Chapter 128: Power Plants

South Block, New Delhi

1 February 1950

The brass heater had been put away for the year, but the Cabinet Room still felt chilly in the morning. The sun had not yet climbed over the Secretariat’s eastern wing. Ram Prasad Gupta sat with a cup of tea cooling at his elbow, rereading a file he had already read twice.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had asked for the meeting, which was unusual in itself. In the eight months since he took charge of the Ministry of Power, he had sent notes, memoranda, and one memorably acid letter about the Damodar Valley survey, but he had never asked for a gathering of the principals. Now he sat at the foot of the long table in his dark coat, small and straight-backed, with a thick blue folder squared in front of him.

Nehru sat to Ram’s left with his chin on his hand. Patel occupied the high-backed chair on the right. He looked better than he had in the spring. The hollows under his cheekbones had filled, and the grey had gone from his skin. A thermos of unbuttered dal-water stood at his elbow, which he regarded with suspicion and drank on schedule. Shroff sat beside him with a ledger. Mookerjee had come over from Industry, and Shastri from Agriculture had slipped in at the last moment and taken the chair nearest the door.

“I will not waste your time with preliminaries,” Savarkar said. His voice was dry and thin, but it carried to every corner of the room. “I will give you three numbers, and then a proposal. The installed generating capacity of the Republic today is one million, seven hundred thousand kilowatts, for three hundred and fifty million people. The Soviet engineers at Bhilai tell me that the first steel complex alone, at full output, will draw one hundred and ten thousand.

The Bangalore enclave, with its wind tunnels, foundries, and laboratories, will draw sixty thousand. Add Jamshedpur, Visakhapatnam, Bhandara, Babina, and the aluminium and fertiliser plants, and the industrial programme the Ministry of Industry has already sanctioned will need over a million kilowatts within four years.”

“We do not have it,” Mookerjee said quietly.

“We do not have half of it, Mookerjee-ji, and what we have is badly distributed. Bombay has power and no coal. Bihar has coal and no grid. Madras has water and no turbines. The Damodar Valley Corporation exists on paper. The Mahanadi has been surveyed three times and dammed not once.” Savarkar opened the folder.

“The second number is a hundred and twenty. That is the number of lives the Home Ministry reckons were lost to floods in the Mahanadi delta, the Damodar basin, and the Sutlej plains in the last monsoon alone. The same rivers that drown the cultivator can light the factory. It would be a sin to let them do one without the other.”

“And the third?” Nehru asked.

“Four. The number of years the British spent drawing plans for these dams and building none of them.” A flicker of something like humour crossed his face. “I have found their files. They are very fine files.”

Ram put down his tea. “You have a proposal.”

“I have a programme.” Savarkar spread a map across the table, weighting its corners with the inkstand and a pair of spectacles. It showed the subcontinent in pale green, laced with blue, and over the blue lay small red circles, each with a name. “Six major multipurpose dams, to be started within the year. Hirakud on the Mahanadi, for flood control in the delta and irrigation to a million acres, with a power house of two hundred and seventy thousand kilowatts.

Bhakra on the Sutlej, to hold back the water that floods Punjab in the monsoon and feeds the cotton lands in summer. Tungabhadra in the south. Koyna in the Western Ghats, where the rainfall is highest and the drop to the coast steepest. Nagarjunasagar on the Krishna. And a chain of four on the Damodar, to do for Bihar and Bengal what the Tennessee Valley Authority did for the American South.”

“Six great dams,” Shroff said. He said it as a man reads a figure he will have to pay.

“Alongside them, five thermal stations at the pitheads: Bokaro, Chandrapura, Singrauli, Neyveli, Korba, so the industrial belts have power in the dry months when the reservoirs are low. And a national grid. The Soviet engineers say the first trunk line from Bhilai to Bombay can be up in eighteen months if the steel for the pylons is released.” Savarkar looked up.

“The Americans have offered turbines. The Soviets have offered boilers. The Germans in Bangalore, who I understand are anxious to be useful, have drawn up the penstock designs. We have the engineers and the equipment. What we have lacked is a decision.”

Patel stirred. “How many people move?”

Savarkar did not look down at the folder. Ram saw that he had known the question would come and had decided not to hide the answer.

“At Hirakud, thirty-five thousand families in the submergence area, more than a hundred thousand souls. At Bhakra, a little under twenty thousand. At Tungabhadra and Nagarjunasagar, perhaps sixty thousand between them. At the Damodar chain, another forty. In all, some two hundred and fifty thousand people over five years. I will not tell you it is small. I will tell you that the floods have already moved more than that, without compensation, without warning, and without a roof to receive them.”

“Compensation,” Shroff said.

“Cash at three times the assessed land value, and replacement land, irrigated, from the command area of the dam itself, in the same district wherever the terrain allows. A house built by the state to the new rural housing code. A place for every adult in the construction works. A school and a dispensary in every resettlement colony.” Savarkar paused. “It is not what the British would have done. It is the least this Republic can do.”

Nehru lifted his head. His face had the open, luminous look it wore when an idea took hold of him. “Savarkar-ji, I have wanted this for twenty years. I have said dams are the temples of modern India. I did not know the Minister of Power would be the man to build them.”

“A man who has spent years in an Andaman cell,” Savarkar said dryly, “acquires strong opinions about wasted time.”

A short, startled silence followed. Then Patel gave a bark of laughter that went on a little longer than the joke deserved, and he wiped his eye with a knuckle.

“The money,” Ram said. “Shroff-ji.”

Shroff turned his ledger a quarter-circle toward the room. “The six dams, with power houses and canals, come to nine hundred crores over eight years on the Ministry’s estimate. The five thermal stations, another three hundred and fifty. The grid, a hundred and sixty. Call it fourteen hundred crores. It is a great deal.” He took off his spectacles.

“But not as great as it would have been a year ago. We hold the Burmah stake and the parity holdings in English Electric and Babcock, which will supply turbines and boilers at cost. The Soviets take jute and cotton for their machinery, not rupees. The Export-Import Bank will lend against the dams themselves at two and a half per cent. We can carry it. I would not call it comfortable.”

“We are fighting a war,” Patel said.

“We are, Sardar-sahib, and it is nearly over. The dams will go on for decades.”

“Which is why we must begin now,” Ram said. He looked around the table at Nehru’s shining eyes, at Patel’s heavy lids, at the tired, exact face of Savarkar, who had waited fifty years to be asked to build something. “I wish to hear objections. If there are none, I shall put it to the vote.”

“One,” Patel said. “The people who are moved.”

“Yes.”

“We have moved a great number of people in three years, Ram, millions, across two borders. We have fed them, housed them, and given most of them a field. I do not want to move another quarter of a million and have it become the kind of thing foreign newspapers write about.”

“It will not, if we do it as I have written it,” Savarkar said.

“It will, Savarkar-ji, if some clerk in Sambalpur decides to be clever with the valuation.” Patel shifted the weight of his cane. “I know how a government acquires land. The man whose field is flooded is told it is for the nation, and the nation arrives in the person of a patwari with a notebook and a taste for bribes. You write that compensation is three times the assessed value. Who does the assessing? Who counts the trees? Who certifies that the replacement land is irrigated and not a rock pile?”

“The Collector, under the Ministry’s supervision.”

“The Collector may be a good man if we are lucky, and his clerk a thief if we are not.” Patel looked at Ram. “I will vote for the dams. But I want an independent resettlement authority, with officers who answer to the Home Ministry and no one else, and a grievance office in every district that a farmer can reach on foot. And I want the first colony built before the first village is flooded, not after.”

“Agreed,” Savarkar said at once. “I had meant to propose it, but I did not think it would come from you, Sardar-sahib.”

“I remember Bardoli,” Patel said. “I remember what happens when the revenue man comes to a village that does not trust him.”

“The vote, then,” Ram said.

Nehru raised his hand first, quickly. Patel followed. Shroff said, “With reservations about the cost, yes.” Mookerjee and Shastri raised theirs together. Ram raised his own last.

“Unanimous. The Hirakud design and the Damodar chain go to tender within ninety days. The resettlement authority will be constituted within thirty. Savarkar-ji, I think you have done something very good.”

Savarkar inclined his head. He did not smile, but he began to fold the map slowly and carefully, as a man folds a flag.

“I have done the arithmetic, Prime Minister,” he said. “The rest is the work of other people.”

Sambalpur District, Orissa

20 February 1950

The survey parties reached Hirakud in the third week of February, in army trucks, with theodolites and chain-men and a line of bullock carts carrying tents. They camped on the bare ridge above the river, where the Mahanadi spread a mile wide, brown and slow, and began driving red-painted stakes into the earth at intervals of a hundred yards.

By the end of the first week, the villagers of Remed and Sarapali had counted the stakes and understood. The red line ran across their paddy fields, through the bamboo grove beside the temple, and over the low rise where their dead had been cremated for four generations. It ended at the river’s edge. Beyond it, the survey engineer had said in careful Oriya, the water would stand in three years’ time a hundred and fifty feet deep.

They had heard about the compensation. A young officer from the Resettlement Authority, a Bengali named Bhattacharya in a jacket too heavy for the climate, had read from a pamphlet in the village school. Three times the land value. A house. Irrigated land. The villagers listened with the stolid politeness of people who have heard promises before. One old woman asked how many officers like him had come to Remed in her lifetime, and how many had come back.

“I will come back, mataji,” Bhattacharya said.

“You will be transferred,” she said, without malice.

Nobody had to send agitators to Remed. The thing was in the red line itself. Within ten days the villagers had held two meetings of their own under the banyan at Sarapali, with no lawyer present. They had drawn up a petition in a schoolboy’s hand, asking where the ashes of their fathers were to go, and sent it to the Collector with forty thumbprints. The Collector forwarded it to Cuttack. Cuttack forwarded it to Delhi. Delhi, in the press of a hundred other matters, sent back a polite acknowledgement.

On the twenty-fifth, a thin, intense former schoolteacher named Basudev Panda, who had been a Communist for six years and a member of the district committee for two, came to Sarapali with four companions. He was not an outsider; he had taught in the Sambalpur school until the headmaster dismissed him for union activity. He did not make speeches. He sat on the ground among the farmers and asked questions. How much land did each family hold? What did they grow? Who was their landlord, and what did he charge?

When he had heard the answers, he told them quietly that the dam would take their land, that the compensation would be paid in rupees, and that rupees did not grow rice.

He was not wrong, and he knew it. Some part of him believed what he said.

“What is a Communist?” a farmer named Sahu murmured to his brother, as Panda talked.

“Someone who wants the land to belong to everyone.”

“It belongs to us,” Sahu said. “That is the trouble.”

But he stayed to the end, as did two hundred others. By dusk a resolution had been carried by a show of hands: no survey stake would stand in Remed, Sarapali, or Lamdungri until the Government told them where their dead were to go.

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