Standing at the bow of his boat, the skies an orange hue, Pavan showed us glimpses of his past. He reminisced about his childhood — a life by the river, a beautiful earthen home with tall wooden doors and a loft to store grain, a community that felt like family, and trees, so many trees. Now you see some of them — the bare canopies, their silhouettes reflected on the orange film of calm — once nurturing, now dead, waiting for the dry season to end so they can disappear beneath the surface, no longer painfully reminding Pavan and the people of the Narmada Valley of a beautiful life that was taken from them, when their Ma (Mother) Narmada was imprisoned by the concrete gates of the Sardar Sarovar Dam.

Pavan now lives in a 12ft-by-12ft tin-shed “transit” house — a state-led displacement story. His “transition” has lasted decades with no compensation, despite his rights per the Resettlement and Rehabilitation Policy. In the 103°F summer heat, Pavan sits waiting under a neem tree outside his tin confinement. When the sun goes down and the heat is slightly more bearable, he enters his tin shed, proceeding to cook dinner on an open fire in the corner of his room; this fire is the only light in Pavan’s “home.” The state’s justification for the social and environmental costs of the Sardar Sarovar dam was access to electricity and drinking water. However, people like Pavan — people who lost everything to the dam — never saw this promise realized.

To cope with the inhumanity of living in his tin-shed, Pavan, as a young boy, would take his boat out to his old house on the Narmada and spend the night in the loft made to store grain — still above the water level. Slowly, over the years, his home completely disappeared into the river, and his grief, his sense of loss, floated to the surface. Pavan’s is just one story. 

An estimated 200,000 people were displaced by the Sardar Sarovar Dam alone, and big dams in India have displaced an estimated 16.4 million people!

Big dams sit at the intersection of developmental progress and engineering feats in their infrastructural symbolism. This intersection made these infrastructures fundamental to our discussions in the Development Engineering program. Reading Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity as part of the curriculum framed my understanding of “expertise” as political, seeing the disciplines of development and planning (my drivers for graduate education) often aligned with imperial or postcolonial state projects that violently embraced uneven development, subjugating subaltern epistemologies and ways of life.

The institution that pioneered ideas of big dams being synonymous with development, proliferating this infrastructure as engines for economic growth, solutions for energy poverty, flood control, and climate change mitigation — The World Bank. Reading Michael Goldman’s articulation of the enlarging scope and power of the World Bank’s neoliberal agenda, influenced how many of us development engineers in training saw the role of this “knowledge bank” in shaping dominant development discourse. 

The knowledge bank furthered epistemologies of empire in the post-colonial Global South, as they controlled the narrative of big dams, leaving out how this infrastructure over-promises and under delivers on all fronts, the enormous social and environmental costs that marginalized communities disproportionately endure, and how big dams are incompatible with a changing climate! The knowledge bank’s narrative assisted in subjugating indigenous relationships among place, knowing, and being.

In Deep Water: The Epic Struggle over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, Jacques Leslie explores how Western powers had been building mega dams since the pioneering Hoover Dam — a political distraction from the economic depression, a promise for prosperity, and an opportunistic time to exploit labor at low wages to perform risky jobs. Two hundred men lost their lives building the Hoover dam. Despite this, it was seen as a symbol of “brilliant innovation,” “a lasting monument,” serving as a “prominent symbol of America’s greatness.” The dominant narrative left out the harm caused by these infrastructures to indigenous communities, it left out the story of their kinship with fish, their world views.

Instead, dam building had become synonymous with nation building.

The dams race was on, and the post-colonial world felt the need to play catch up. The Bank and development “experts” proliferated a paradigm that painted these infrastructures as engines of economic growth, symbols of modernity and progress. In India, rivers are worshipped, considered sacred, named after goddesses, their waters believed to erase sins and deliver spiritual liberation. So, how then, would a people who revered these mythological geographies, allow the shackles of concrete to confine them?  

How would the state justify dams and their associated human displacement? 

The country’s Independence-era Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, found a way. “Dams are the temples of modern India,” he said, feeding the pursuit of postcolonial developmentalism. However, Adivasi communities who revere the rivers and consider fish their kin imbibe spiritual traditions deeply rooted in animism, nature worship and ancestral reverence — epistemologies are in stark contrast to post-colonial epistemologies of empire that fragment resources and dominate nature. The hegemony of the Bretton Woods Institutions, which included the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, fed development pursuits as funders and knowledge partners, playing a key role in subjugating subaltern epistemologies and driving the neo-colonial global imbalance of wealth and power. 

Understanding this manufactured poverty and inequality and the role eurocentric ideas of modernity play in narratives of progress were foundational themes in the DevEng course, Critical Systems of Development, where we read scholars like Arturo Escobar, Jason Hickel, Kwame Nkrumah, and Walter Rodney. While reading The Rise of the Bank by Michael Goldman, we followed the Bank’s hegemonic global presence under the leadership of Robert McNamara, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense who also played a key role in the Vietnam War. 

This was the era that fueled World Bank funding for India’s Sardar Sarovar Dam. 

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), a social movement consisting of adivasis, farmers, environmentalists and human rights activists, fought against this development induced displacement, violence against nature, and hegemony of the World Bank. Using Gandhian ideals of civil disobedience and non-violence — they fought for their land, their Ma Narmada, and their indigenous ways of life. Women stood in the rising waters of the Narmada for days, fighting with their bodies and ideals. They tied their hands to one another so that they wouldn’t be able to retaliate even if the police beat and dragged them, which they did. They were peaceful. They were inspiring. And through their persistence, they won. 

The World Bank revoked its funding for the Sardar Sarovar Dam in 1993! 

The State continued with the project, however, the bank changed its policies, taking a hiatus from the dam building sector. Since 2012 the bank has been involved in India’s dam “rehabilitation” and safety industry, while the Narmada Bachao Andolan enter their fourth decade of struggle — now for the people’s rehabilitation and resettlement, and for safety against dam mis-management by the state.

People from the Narmada Bachao Andolan marching across the river, 2024 (left) Indefinite hunger strike led by Medha Patkar with demands that include the full and fair compensation for all families affected by the Sardar Sarovar Dam and limiting the dam height to 122 meters (right): both pictures by the author

Despite the unimaginable social and environmental costs of mega dams, The World Bank has re-emerged as a funder, while the U.S. — the Bank’s founder and largest shareholder, is on a massive dam dismantling spree. 

Why this paradox in the approach to big dams?

“We believe the bank’s rediscovered fondness for big hydro reflects a desire by Ajay Banga, the bank’s president since June 2023, to kick off his tenure with a splash,” Josh Klemm, co-executive director of International Rivers told Undark, “even if that involves overlooking environmental and social issues that previously would have ruled the projects out.” 

Despite the World Bank’s reversal in policy, could the shifting paradigm of big dams, where Western powers like the U.S. dismantle their own, reshape the narrative of big dams as symbols of “development?”

Listening to Mark Bransom, CEO of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation during his keynote address at UC Berkeley’s 21st River Restoration Symposium, I saw glimpses of this reshaping. Bransom described the engineering complexities of taking down the Klamath Dams and reflected on the need to include the undoing — the cost of decommissioning and dismantling — before the doing — the building of these infrastructures. He spoke of a threshold that the Klamath tribes felt like they were crossing with the demolitions — a crossing into a different world, a healing of the past. 

Could we cross into a world where indigenous epistemologies are valorized — where human-fish kinships are respected and future generations accounted for? I see the dismantling of the Klamath Dams as countering dominant narratives of “progress,” “modernity,” and “development” associated with this infrastructure. Reflecting from the free flowing waters of the Klamath River, is the success of a peoples’ decolonial movement, the strength of indigenous world views, the beginnings of the dismantling of epistemologies of empire. 

Development Engineering, with its ethos centering community expertise and disrupting the way “development” and “engineering” are practiced and perceived, has the potential to engage in this dismantling — to decolonize development.