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The River Narmada is India’s longest west flowing river, flowing through the three western states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. The Sardar Sarovar dam is the terminal dam on the river in Gujarat and is a part of the Narmada Valley Development Plan (NVDP) which includes 30 big, 135 medium and 3000 small dams on the river and its tributaries.
The SSP alone will submerge 245 villages with a population of two hundred and fifty thousand people, many of whom are tribals and other natural resource dependent communities. Another estimated two hundred and fifty thousand people will be adversely impacted and many of them displaced due to the project infrastructure like the canals and the project colony; as well as the downstream impacts of the dam; those to be affected due to the declaration of the Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary for relocation of wildlife to be impacted by the dam; those to be impacted due to compensatory afforestation and even secondary displacement. If all the other dams on the river Narmada are taken into account, then altogether over a million people will be displaced or lose their livelihoods. It is these project affected people who form the backbone of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), the powerful people’s resistance movement against the SSP. Besides the impact it will have on people, the project will also have devastating impacts on the ecology and environment of the Narmada valley.
From the other side, the SSP is projected as the lifeline of Gujarat, and it is being claimed that it will irrigate eighteen lakh hectares of cultivable land, generate power and supply drinking water to thirteen thousand villages and a large number of cities in the state. The Government claims that there is no alternative to this project which can solve the water problems of Gujarat permanently and will turn the whole state into Nandanvan- a paradise. This claim has been strongly challenged by the NBA and many other experts.