Dams & quakes

"THE EFFECTS of the Narmada Verdict" by Mr. Jai Sen (The Hindu, July 31) highlights the afflictions of modern India: the greed of a large section of the people and the wanton violence by the rulers unleashed by their heedless enjoyment of the centralisation of power. But beyond a certain limit, as vividly narrated by Lord Krishna in the Bhagavadgita, their actions will end in self-destruction and are being felt with astounding speed. Lord Krishna's discourse on public interest science as opposed to reductionist vested interest specialist science is powerful and meaningful in this context:

There is true knowledge, learn thou it is this: to see one changeless life in all the lives, in the separate, the One Inseparable. There is imperfect knowledge: that which sees the separate existences apart and seeing them apart, holding them to be real. And there is false knowledge: to cling to one line of action as if it were all, heedless of the consequences, heedless of the harm, narrow and dull and dark.

Interconnected

The message is clear: to make the people flee like rats, to make them drown so the chosen can enjoy the short lived consequences of large dams paying lip service to national security while dangling the virtual fig of cash compensation is to sentence the displaced or the drowned to an involuntary acceptance of the falsehood: ``life is profit''. However the specialists have forgotten that the universe is interconnected and the biosphere is born out of such interconnections of the true and therefore of enduring and successful ways of life, in harmony with all that is successful. When you harm the living, being a part of the web, you will also be harmed. When you destroy the living, you will be destroyed as well, because you are alive. That is what is happening in the world today as devastatingly demonstrated by dams.

As the stalwarts against arrogant displacement of people by large dams face court hearings, waters are rising behind all the dams on the Indian tectonic plate, all of them gigantic, built during the last century, one by one commissioned over the years. While they filled up during each monsoon, the cumulative effects of the rising waters behind more and more dams also rose. That is until 1982-83, when like a mammoth underground nuclear explosion of a billion hydrogen bombs, the number of earthquakes occurring annually doubled its rate of increase, from 3.5 per cent per annum compounded to about 7 per cent. The number of earthquakes of magnitude 1.0 to 9.9 MW (moment magnitude scale) rose dramatically from 4,479 in 1973 (from June to May: the hydrological year between monsoons) to 20,689 in the year 2000 (by a factor of 4.6).

This year on January 26, when the waters in all the dams were being drained, the oscillations on the restive Indian tectonic plate resulted in the rare Bhuj earthquake appearing sooner than it used to, by a factor of 4.6. This year during the monsoon, the waters in the dams are again synchronising their rises - the fruits of the work of 50 years or more are now being experienced in a single monsoon and its effects again felt till the coming of the next monsoon. Already, a mighty quake off the coast of Southern Peru of 8.3 MW on June 23 has been followed by another devastating one of 7.5 MW just two weeks later on July 7. Almost certainly a period of mighty quakes will be witnessed in the coming months and years by the Indian tectonic plate being made progressively more dangerous by the automatically synchronised rising and falling of the waters behind all the dams in the subcontinent.

Precautionary principle

The people of India must urge and succeed in making the Indian Governments to apply the precautionary principle which they abandoned with the advent of colonialism which forced the people to forget the sara of the Gita, which, as Radhakrishnan pointed out, was being actively practised by the rulers.

The public hearings must take place repeatedly in every corner of the country to implement decentralised decision making, also in the case of the Narmada dam, after suspending work on the dams for review. I would be glad to place before any such hearings my own study (awaiting publication) on how dams in India are contributing to earthquakes worldwide. Applying the precautionary principle, the government will find out for itself that the earthquakes do not differentiate between say Gujarat and areas outside where people ``would flee like rats or drown'' when the waters in the dams rise.

R. ASHOK KUMAR

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