The River Narmada is India’s longest west flowing river, flowing through the three western states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. SSP 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 is to submerge 245 villages with a population of two hundred and fifty thousand people, many of who are tribals and other natural resource dependent communities. Another two hundred and fifty thousand people are estimated to be adversely impacted and many of them even displaced due to the project infrastructure like the canals and project colony, due to the downstream of the dam, etc. If all the other dams on the river Narmada are taken together then over a million people are to be displaced or lose their livelihoods. It is these project affected people that form the backbone of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), the powerful people’s resistance against the SSP. Apart from the impact on people, the project will also have devastating impacts on the ecology and environment.
On the other side, the SSP is projected to be the lifeline of the state of Gujarat with plans to provide irrigation to eighteen lakh hectares of cultivable land, generate power and supply drinking water to thirteen thousand villages in the state. It has been claimed by the Government that there is no alternative to this project to address the water problems of Gujarat. This claim has been strongly challenged by the NBA and many other experts.