DAM[N]ED
In collaboration with
Dhara and Nishant Mittal
Sponsored By
Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, Research through Planning ($5,000)
Research Assistant
Olaia Chivite Amigo
Date
May 2017 – March 2018
Restructuring water landscapes in the interest of prosperity and national identity building continues to govern contemporary Indian ideology, and has displaced close to 40 million people over the years. Adding to the social implications of these massive, politically driven migrations are the ecological consequences of the drastic transformation of the landscape to serve productive and economic purposes.
First envisaged in the 1940s, the NVDP comprises 30 large dams, 135 medium dams and 3000 small dams and aims to provide potable water to almost 40 million people, irrigation for over five million hectares of land and hydroelectric power for the entire region. The largest amongst these components is the Sardar Sarovar Project, which will bring additional irrigation capacity, drinking water and 1450 megawatts of hydro power to Gujarat and Rajasthan.
Resisting this narrative of national progress, the NVDP has been widely questioned, raising the need for more stringent environmental protection measures to seize the impact of such mega-development projects. At the center of this, were massive protests from local, national and international agencies to the World Bank’s initial support to the SSP in 1985. Despite the unprecedented World Bank withdrawal from the project by 1994 and the national pressure led by the Narmada Bachao Andolan- a coalition fighting for the rights of the native settlers – and the local processes of civil resistance, the Indian Government reinstated its power moving the project forward. As a result, with thousands of people already displaced without proper compensation, recent approved plans will submerge 245 additional villages.
Through a series of cartographic studies and photographic inventories, this project traces the contrasting narratives of modernization and massive public works, and physical and spiritual belonging, to the river intangible landscapes. The journey pauses in Omkareshwar, an important destination in the Narmada Parikrama, where pilgrims visit the many temples and encounter the Narmada holy waters in the ghats and the Sangam. As pilgrims engage in their bathing rituals with decreasing water levels, the daunting presence of the Omkareshwar Dam hides behind a large reservoir that submerged many villages and sacred sites in its making
In a landmark ruling last March 2017, India’s courts conferred the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers the status of “living entities.” As the Indian National Government plans to redraw its entire terrain of water in the name of national progress, giving the rivers human legal rights has global significance and gives hope to those who have long battled to address decades of environmental and social injustice. By bringing together the conflicting nature of the water, energy, human and spiritual landscapes, this visual narrative calls for more just patterns of hinterlands urbanization.