What are the alternatives to large dams? Smaller or bigger projects for instance?
Well, that’s in another realm of course. In India, big dams are the sort of alternate religion if you like and any argument against them is blocked with a kind of irrational passion which I have only understood lately. But big dams are the kind of temples of modern development, as Nehru said, although he retracted that statement, but if you actually look at what big dams have done, first of all in the last 50 years, the rough calculation is that they’ve displaced between 33 and 40 million people. There is no rehabilitation policy, there is no record of what has happened to these people, which is chilling you know. So they are saying that we were we need these big dams to produce food, to produce electricity, to produce running water, then you put a price on this you tell us how much the water in our taps costs, how much the electricity in our houses costs, but you don’t take into account the actual price. So on what basis are you doing this? Now they have produced electricity, of cours
