The Temples of Modern India and the Villages Beneath Them

When the Bhakra dam on the Sutlej was completed in the early 1960s, it stood roughly 226 metres tall, among the highest dams of its kind in the world. Jawaharlal Nehru, who followed its construction closely, is credited with calling such structures the temples of modern India, a phrase that has since become shorthand for an entire era of faith in engineering. The reservoir behind Bhakra, named Govind Sagar after Guru Gobind Singh, submerged the old town of Bilaspur and many villages in the surrounding hills. The same sentence of history holds a triumph and a loss, and a mature essay on development must refuse to separate them.

The case for the great dams in the 1950s was not frivolous. A newly independent country of about 360 million people, with the memory of the Bengal famine still fresh, depended on a monsoon that delivers most of its rain in a few weeks. The Damodar Valley Corporation, created in 1948 and modelled in part on the Tennessee Valley Authority of the United States, had already shown how a river could be treated as one system of power, water and flood control. Reservoirs promised irrigation, flood control and electricity at once. Bhakra's canals watered farmland in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan and fed the Green Revolution that followed. B. R. Ambedkar, who as Labour Member of the Viceroy's Council in the 1940s is associated with early planning for river valley projects, is often remembered as seeing water and power as instruments of social justice, because they could lift those who owned little land and less capital.