Development, the Chart of Hierarchy

The Tarbela Dam has come at a high environmental cost. For instance, “the tail end of Indus receives so little water that today Sindh’s agriculture faces extinction. Further reduction of water will increase salinity, land erosion and sea-flooding that will severely damage the Indus delta” (Sering). This environmental problem is ripe with political tension as well as economic and social consequences. It is what fuels Sindh’s grievances with the Government of Punjab and its opposition to dam projects. “Islamabad’s diversions of water to upstream communities with ties to the government are inflaming sectarian loyalties and stoking unrest in the lower downstream region of Sindh” (Wheeler).

The government generally focuses on macro-level goals and tends to ignore the locals who get impacted by dam projects, at a micro-level. For instance, the locals as individual dwellers of Tarbela were excluded from the decision making process of the dam, in the late 1960s. Even after the signing of the project that made WAPDA the active authority, the government did not exercise public participation. In 2000 the World Commission on Dams consulted 900 individuals who were affected by the Tarbela Dam and their consensus was that they were “never consulted about the development of the [Tarbela] project or given alternatives to achieve the same objective” (“World Commission on Dams”, p. 309).

The dam project submerged one hundred and twenty agricultural communities, displacing ninety six thousand people, most of whom were subsistence farmers. The communities were not resettled together, disrupting their old social order. The set compensation criteria discriminated against small landowners (plots lesser than 0.2 hectares/0.5 acres of irrigated land or 0.8 hectares/2 acres of rain-fed land) who were eligible for cash compensation only, while two thirds of the affected population qualified for agricultural replacement land. “The negotiations and discussions excluded women and the landless” (Bennett & McDowell, p. 39). Those who depended on the river for their livelihood, but did not necessarily live in Tarbela, were also extremely disadvantaged, namely the fishermen, boatmen and zarkash (gold panners). They had no say or legal rights to compensation (Bennett & McDowell, p. 39).

The actual resettlement was a political stunt. The government of Sindh refused to release “65 percent of the allocated land” (Bennett & McDowell, p. 39). On paper, some fictitious names were recorded to evidence the compensated.Those who were fortunate enough to actually receive compensation obtained only partial dues; they were previous owners of 100s of acres of good quality land, for which they received 4 acres (World Commission on Dams, p. 367).

It has been over three decades since the dam was built, but many of the dislocated are still struggling for full compensation of the land they lost to the Tarbela Dam. Their entire lives have been spent on recovering from a loss that they were forced to incur in the name of national progress. There are currently 500 outstanding cases of those affected by the those affected by the Tarbela Dam Project and by the smaller, Ghazi Barotha Project that are stuck in litigation in courts across the country, including the Supreme Court. It is an issue that has continued to haunt WAPDA, which in April 2012 set up an independent and impartial Resettlement Claim Commission (“Commission Constituted”).

The injustice of the compensation process is made worse by the fact that resettlement was imposed by the government on the local people. The decision to build the Tarbela Dam was made in the international and (Punjabi) national arena but its negative consequences were felt by the locals, both the upstream farmers/landowners who were uprooted from their land as well as the downstream Sindhi farmers who suffered from the decline of water flow and silt deposit and, the fishermen whose catch dropped (World Commission on Dams, p. 309).

Most of the agricultural population of Tarbela was relocated to townships similar to the rural Chinese who were moved to towns to make way for the recent Three Gorges Dam (Up the Yangtze). This move to urban centers had a profound impact on the displaced, as it changed their waterworld, the totality of social domains that are informed by water in a given society (Orlove & Caton, p. 403). Interviews, with people who were displaced by Tarbela, conducted thirty years later show how long lasting the impact has been. Rafaqat Ali Khan, who moved to Karachi after being evicted from Tarbela related:

[To create] an alternative to Tarbela is not possible. The people there followed a collective pattern of life. They would work the whole day but in the evening you would see them in the hujra [traditional meeting place for men] sharing information with one another, and one another’s problems, too. Here we don’t have it; everybody is part of a machine...they have to work as laborers...No one has time to share the problems of others...There is no such thing [as the hujra] here. (Bennett & McDowell, p. 46)

This quote touches on how locals may not see urbanization and industrialization as “development”. Many locals would rather be self-sufficient subsistence farmers and live in small communities, where they have a strong social and safety network (Bennett & McDowell, p. 46). They would rather depend on a river than on money. Also, for the rural locals in Sindh, the dam has resulted in the depletion of the natural resources of the Indus such as water, fish, and silt, rendering their farmland or fishing grounds unproductive. Consequently they are forced to migrate to Karachi, a large metropolitan that has a population of over 10 million people. They come in as environmental refugees who struggle to find jobs and end up living in lawless slums (Pearce, p. 32).

However it is misleading to homogenize the experiences and views of the local peoples. There are also narratives of the displaced who found the move to a city liberating, both economically and socially. These were often the people from marginalized groups such as the landless and women. A city gave them the opportunity to secure a job and become economically independent or to acquire an education that allowed for upward mobility. Women, from both poor and rich families of Tarbela, especially prized access to education; it empowered them to work and/or take care of themselves when the men they depended on became jobless or drug addicts. However even those who have benefited from their relocation feel a deep sense of loss that no amount of money or public service can erase (Bennett & McDowell, p. 52 & 57).