In 1988, when the country approved the project, the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, at the instance of the Planning Commission laid down a parri passu clause, which said that the construction would be cleared only with the pace of rehabilitation and an environment plan. I know this for a fact, since I was the Planning Commission member who bore with the hours of grilling by the PM on technical, environmental and rehabilitation details. He then cleared the project and became one of its advocates. Finally grievance redressal authorities were set up, chaired by a retired judge approved by the chief justice of India, to which a dissatisfied project-affected person can go and, if they are not satisfied with the action of the authorities, they can move the Supreme Court.

I am not big on dams, in principle. I believe that there are good projects and there are bad ones, too. As a minister, I delayed Tehri by getting reviews of high-powered committees of the rehabilitation plan and the safety aspects. More recently I asked the Ken Betwa link to go back to the drawing board since it had obvious limitations. It is true that lakhs of persons are dislocated by projects which do not have a rehabilitation plans and they never get attention. With much less preparation, Indira Sagar has been completed. It is just that SSP is not one of them.

The decision to allow the dam height to reach 121 metres was taken by the Narmada Control Authority after going through the entire drill. They were empowered to do so by the Supreme Court in 2000, since the resettlement, rehabilitation and environment issues are in detail looked into by their bodies and what was earlier called the parri passu link of these issues with the construction would become transparent. There can therefore be no question of opening the issue again.

... contd.