This Power point Presentation will give you knowledge about dams and its uses.

3. Dams and the nation: independent India
and the official appeal of big dams
• Anti-colonial response
• Modernism and science
• Self-sufficiency in food
production
• Historical legacies

4. • Need for food
• India has a population of more
than one billion and growing
• rainfall is highly seasonal
• Significant regional variability
of rainfall
• Large population living at or
below poverty line
• Need for power
• Growing proportion living in
cities
• Rural electrification and
agricultural uses
• No oil or gas resources

5. THE PRESENT SITUATION:
POLARIZATION
• Significant local protest
• Court challenges
• International pressure
• Academic studies
• Contemporary India
“one of the most active
dam-building countries
on earth”
• Multiple large projects
currently underway
• Significant political will
shown at state &
national levels
• World Bank pullout

6. The Narmada Project
• More than 30 major dams
• Power and water to primarily benefit Gujarat
• Displaced people and lands primarily in MP
• Oustees disproportionately poor and powerless
• Ca. 1.5 million to be displaced
• No environmental studies
• No rehabilitation plan in place yet
• More than 20 years in progress thus far

7. Protest against Narmada Project:
Narmada Bachao Andolan
Forms of protest developed during
independence
movement deployed against
government-led
dam projects in India

8. Bhakra Dam
• Highest concrete gravity dam in Asia
• Hydroelectric
• Intensive production of HYV wheat
and rice
• Industrialized production
• Punjab “breadbasket of India”
Often credited with making India self-sufficient in food

9. • Reservoirs were highly
elaborated in Middle period
southern India and Sri Lanka
• Both large and small reservoirs
continue in use
• The impacts of older
reservoirs were comparable to
those of modern ones
• Ecological effects
• Social effects
• Cultural logics of patronage and
rule

10. The Peninsular Interior:
Archaeology of an Agrarian
Landscape
• Contexts of patronage & construction
• Elite financing
• Ritual associations
• Labor mobilization
• Histories of reservoirs on the
landscape
• Patterns of construction, maintenance,
and abandonment
• Siltation patterns, sediment inflow
• Regional Vegetation Histories
• Patterns of hillside erosion and valley
floor siltation
• Integration of Agricultural facilities with
settlements, road networks, markets,
etc.

11. PROBLEMS WITH LARGE DAMS
• Environmental problems
• Submergence of forests and
other ecosystems
• Siltation behind the dam
• Loss of fertility downstream
• Loss of reservoir capacity
• Exacerbation of downstream
erosion
• Blocked passage for
migratory animals
• Micro environmental effects
on climate
The Mahaseer is now threatened
in many Indian rivers

12. • Environmental Problems
• Possible tectonic effects
• Water pollution
• Algae blooms, pesticides
• Habitat for invasive plants
• Waterlogging of command
area
• Salinization of command
area
• Decreases in agricultural
production

13. • Human Consequences
• Inundation of land, villages, homes,
sacred places
• Displacement
• Unequal water distribution
• Exacerbates power differences
• Loss of rural employment
• Encouragement of commercial
production
• Loss of subsistence independence
• Loss of local jobs

14. Bhakra-Nangal: Human Costs
• 50 years later, displaced
people still not fully
resettled
• Only landed compensated
• Loss of soil fertility means
crops cannot be grown
without chemical
fertilizers
• Subsistence farming no
longer possible
• Rural indebtedness
• Farmer suicides

15. Breach in the Moolathara Dam near Chittur
in Palakkad district of Kerala. (The Hindu, Nov. 11, 2009)

16. Alternatives?
• Analysis of older dams and
reservoirs shows that many
problems are intrinsic to
these facilities
• Large dams have always
been power-laden
technologies, with unequal
benefits and risks
• Smaller-scale facilities can
work, but require significant
attention to watershed
protection and equal access
Cattle-power has been largely replaced
by electric pumps
15th
century canal still in use

17. Discussion
• Critiques of large dams and
reservoirs
• Problems of these kinds of facilities
are not unique
• Vision of Sustainable alternatives
• Need more realistic sense of
“traditional” facilities
• Existing system as “facts on the
ground”
• Specific cultural contexts matter
for both the past and present
• Cultural logics of reservoir patronage
in South Asia
• Dams as signs of modernity and
progress, “big science”
Erosion near Bhadra reservoir

18. Colonial Reservoirs
• Pattern of failure and low productivity continued
• Rhetoric of a previous golden age when tanks all in use and in
better repair
• Mosse: British saw problems as a failure of traditional village
institutions, not as consequence of colonial disruptions of
political relations
• Parallel to “new traditionalists”
• Same arguments used in Middle periods, logic of restoration
• Complex variety of arrangements for control and maintenance
of reservoirs

19. British India:
Emergence of the “Imperial Tank”
Destructive potential of reservoirs of
interest from beginning
• Category of “protective” vs.
“productive” works
• Imperial Tanks
• Breach may threaten railways
• Madras Presidency
• 5 in 1884-85
• 87 in 1989-99
• Reservoirs have always been
power-laden technologies

20. Environmental and Human Costs of
Reservoirs:
Old & New
• Modern dams and
traditional tanks not
different in kind
• Faced many of the same
problems
• Transformed environments
• Associated with resource
inequality
• High rates of failure
• Scalar differences do exist
but old does not mean small
• Seasonality of supply
probably more critical

21. Discussion & Prospects
• Romantic image of traditional
irrigation detracts from
legitimate critique of modern
projects
• Long-term historical analysis can
lay foundation for realistic
assessment of the possibilities of
tank regeneration programs
• Contemporary rhetoric on dam-
building in India takes from both
western and Indian tropes

22. SUBMITTED BY:-
• Name – Karan Singh Rawat
Abhishek Bhardwaj
Harshit Sharma
Class – X-C