Social dimensions of large dams

The suggested social impacts of large dams – resettlement; compensation for land, houses, and crops to affected populations; loss of archaeological, traditional, and ancestral burial sites; impact on downstream livelihoods, and resettlers’ emotional and psychological problems – are said to be among the issues that bring the imperative for large dams into question. These issues received less attention when dams were being planned and constructed in the past but are now seen as being of greater significance (Scudder, 2005).

The number of people displaced by large dam construction has come under severe criticism in recent years. Although there are no accurate data on this, the WCD estimates that the number of people affected is between 40 and 80 million (WCD, 2000a). However, resettlement literature, including that of the World Bank’s resettlement review of displaced people in 1994 reviewed by Fernandes and Paranjpye (1997), Cernea (1997a & b), Jing (1999) and Scudder (2005) concludes that this number is a gross underestimation because large dam displacement accounted for 63 percent of total infrastructure-induced involuntary resettlement (ibid). Scudder (2005) believes that the lack of familiarity of most planners and practitioners with resettlement issues is the main cause of unsatisfactory resettlement planning and execution.

In a study of the resettlement outcomes of 50 large dams on five continents, Scudder (ibid) concludes that resettlement living standards improved in about 7 percent of all cases and 11 percent had their livelihoods restored, but the remaining 82 percent were worse off than before resettlement. In Thukral’s Big Dams, Displaced People: Rivers of Sorrow, Rivers of Change (1992), most authors explicitly criticise the inability to effectively and satisfactorily manage large dam-induced resettlements in India (Mankodi, 1992; Singh and Samantray, 1992; Viegas, 1992; Singh, 1997). While Rich (1994) recounts how large dams in Brazil, India, Thailand, and Indonesia have led to displacement and hardship for several thousand people, Pearce (1992) refers to the Akosombo and Kainji resettlements as horror stories displacing 80,000 and 40,000 people respectively. Consequently, if the purpose of resettlement is to restore and improve the living standards of dam-affected people to better than pre-project levels, the inability to meet this target is a huge failure of large dam resettlement (Scudder, 2005).

Table 4.1: Publications and reports about the environmental and social problems of large dams

No Name of Report Organisation/Author(s) Date

Published 1 Alternatives in Water Management Committee on Water of the US National Academic of Sciences -

National Research Council (NAS-NRC)

1966 2 Problems Arising from Man-Made Lakes in the

Tropics

Lowe-McConnell 1966

3 Man-Made Lakes, The Accra Symposium Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences/Leticia E. Obeng (Ed) 1969 4 Man-made Lakes as Modified Ecosystems International Council of Scientific Unions’ Scientific Committee on

Problems of the Environment (SCOPE)

1972 5 Geographical Monograph on ‘Man-Made Lakes:

Their Problems and Environmental Effects’

American Geographical Unions/Ackermann et. al., (Eds) 1973 6 The Careless Technology: ecology and International

Development

Farvar and Milton (Eds) 1973

7 Social and Environmental Effect of Large Dams Goldsmith and Hildyard (Eds) 1984&1986

8 The Dammed: Rivers, Dams, and the Coming World Water Crisis

Pearce 1992

9 Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank,

Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development

Rich 1994

10 Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams

McCully 1996

11 Dams As Aid: A Political Anatomy of Nordic Development Thinking

Ursher (Ed) 1997

However, using the number of dam-induced displaced people and problems of resettlement as a basis for criticising dams has been challenged. For instance Varma (1999) argues that local politicians, NGOs and intermediaries are misleading and exploiting dam-affected people for their own ends by blaming the dam industry for resettlement problems while doing little themselves to aid displaced people, and he recommends that more effort should be made to effectively, judiciously and comprehensively implement the resettlement and rehabilitation of dam-affected people (ibid). It is therefore suggested that peoples’ priorities, their socio-cultural frameworks and economics would enable them to achieve improvement in their standard of living by taking advantage of new economic opportunities in the areas of tourism, fisheries, and irrigation while at the same time preserving – to the extent possible – the social characteristics of their lifestyle (ICOLD, 1997; Varma, 1999).

Compensation for properties such as land, houses, and crops affected by large dams is undervalued and not transparent. Singh and Samantray (1992) and Viegas (1992) argue that people displaced by the Hirakud and Nagarjunasagar Dams in India were cheated of their compensation through underpayment. In some cases, compensation for properties forfeited to dam projects were either unduly delayed for several years or not paid at all (Viegas, 1992). Displaced people are also said to have been defrauded of their lands through the use of a law which allowed replacement of land lost to the project with other land around the project site by offering them about a quarter of their original land area (ibid). This led some displaced people to resort to the law courts for redress (Bhanot and Singh, 1992; Viegas, 1992). These problems are among the issues used to argue against large dam construction.

There are arguments that people uprooted from their ancestral land and resettled elsewhere suffer physical, psychological and emotional problems, particularly the elderly, women, and children (Scudder, 2005). The loss of archaeological and ancestral burial sites with important significance for traditional religious beliefs and cultural practices is also said to be a highly stressful experience for local and indigenous people (ibid). Accordingly, Scudder (ibid: 24-28) argues that there are four categories of stress associated with resettlements which have a huge impact on resettlers: physiological stress, which ‘refers to the various health impacts associated with removal’; psychological stress relating to ‘anxiety over the future’ and the loss of home in the sense of ‘community’, ‘surrounding landscape’, ‘historical accounts’, ‘myths’ and ‘religious symbolism’; socio-cultural stress, which is ‘precipitated by threats to a community’s cultural identity’; and multidimensional stress ‘prevalent during the years that precedes resettlement, during physical relocation and during the years immediately after resettlement’ and can continue for a while due to ‘unsatisfactory outcome’ (ibid). These physical, psychological and emotional stresses associated with large dam resettlements make them the antithesis of sustainability.

The stresses that resettled people experience are a ‘totalising’ experience that is ‘the most acute expression of powerlessness because it constitutes a loss of control over one’s physical space’ (Scudder (2005), citing Oliver-Smith (2002), and Koenig (2001)). Resettlement stresses are said also to impoverish the people because they take away ‘economic, social and cultural resources all at the same time’, as also ‘political power, most dramatically the power to make a decision about where and how to live’ (ibid: 22). Scudder therefore argues that most ‘educated and mobile professionals continue to be unaware of how stressful involuntary resettlement’ could be ‘for people with strong ties to their homes’ and with ‘little education and experience’ outside their immediate area. He adds that academics – particularly those involved in resettlement – ‘run the risk of underemphasising the trauma involved’ in involuntary resettlement (ibid). The criticism about the traumatic impact of large dams on resettled people, though less researched, attracted attention particularly within the health sector and became an issue for the anti-large dam campaigners (ibid). The implication is that the psychological, physical, and emotional stresses suffered by resettled people outweighed the socio-economic importance of large dams.

Large dams are said to contribute to the destruction of the livelihoods of millions of downstream local people who depend on the annual and seasonal flooding of floodplains by flowing rivers for their sustenance. Downstream floodplains are used for flood recession agriculture to supplement rain-fed farms, riverine and floodplain fishing and fish farms, and they support livestock grazing in dry seasons (McCully, 2001). Scudder (2005) argues that the tendency to ignore or belittle the productivity of ‘flood-dependent economies’ against that of large dams is because planners usually misconceive their productivity by measuring it in terms of units of land instead of units of water, capital, and labour productivity, especially in cases where large dams for irrigation schemes are concerned. Overall, the impacts on downstream communities’ livelihoods have rarely been factored into large dam development and this has led to their needs being neglected in large dam planning and implementation, denying them the right to compensation for loses incurred by large dam construction upstream (ibid). The impacts of large dams on the livelihoods of downstream communities undermine their significance and suggest that such communities would be better off without them.

It appears that the damage caused by large dams to local and regional societies results from factors that have either been inadequately considered or completely neglected by dam planners. These are resettlement and compensation for land, houses, and crops to affected local and indigenous people; loss of archaeological, traditional, and ancestral burial sites; impact on downstream people’s livelihoods, and the accompanying emotional and psychological problems endured by resettlers. These social factors are still

relevant to large dam construction and need to be seriously considered in all large dam planning and execution, not added as an afterthought.