From Kukra to Dharampuri: People's Commission exposes human toll of India's most disputed dam

Counterview News 

A scathing independent citizens' inquiry has concluded that the Sardar Sarovar Project on the Narmada river, one of India's most ambitious multipurpose dams, has systematically violated the legal and human rights of tens of thousands of displaced families while overstating its economic benefits and understating its ecological costs.

The "Report of the People's Commission on Sardar Sarovar–Narmada Project: Social, Environmental & Economic Reappraisal," released in May 2026, was prepared by a three-member commission comprising Justice (Retd.) Anjana Prakash, sociologist and social activist Enakshi Ganguly, and environmentalist Gorky Chakraborty. It was published by Jalbiradari (Maharashtra), the Development Research Institute (Odisha), and Himdhara (Himachal Pradesh) following public hearings and field visits in Madhya Pradesh's Badwani district from August 22 to 24, 2025, during which the commissioners visited fourteen sites and listened to depositions from affected persons across Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat.

The report paints a devastating picture of a project that, despite being officially declared complete in 2017 and inaugurated as a triumph of modern engineering, has left behind a trail of displacement, inequity, and ecological damage. It notes that while the Narmada Valley Development Plan envisaged 30 large, 135 medium, and over 3,000 small dams, Sardar Sarovar alone submerged 241 villages and one township across the three states, displacing or affecting over 40,000 families according to official estimates, though the actual number is believed to be far higher. 

The commission found that more than 15,946 families were excluded from rehabilitation rolls following a controversial 2008 revision of backwater levels by a technical sub-committee of the Narmada Control Authority, a revision that the expert Devendra Pandey Committee had declared unscientific and violative of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award.

The human cost documented in the report is harrowing. In Kukra village in Barwani, families continue to live on a "tapu" or island surrounded by water on three sides during the monsoon, with no electricity and damaged houses. Pawan Kevat, a villager, saved residents during the September 2023 floods when authorities seemed unaware of the impending disaster; two people died of electrocution because power connections had not been switched off.

Devendra, known as Pappu, told the commission that his family was allotted saline, uncultivable land in Bharuch district, Gujarat, 400 kilometres from his homeland, and that repeated applications to grievance redressal authorities since 2003 had received no reply. In Chikhalda, a village of over 1,000 families that was fully submerged in 2019, the archaeological significance of the site—identified by the Archaeological Survey of India as the first place in Asia where farming was undertaken—has been lost, with the statue of Mahatma Gandhi now raised above the full reservoir level to create a false impression of normalcy.

At Nanakbaydi, around 60 families, mostly farm labourers from Chikhalda, Kadmal, Nisarpur, and Bajrikheda, have been living in tin sheds since 2019, with no clean toilets, water, or electricity, and many have not received the promised ₹5.80 lakh housing grant. Sushila, a member of the Nath community, described how police forcibly removed them from their homes and assured them of compensation that never fully materialised; two children died of sunstroke in the tin sheds. In Dharampuri, the only township affected, 1,387 houses and shops were submerged in 2023, yet authorities contradicted their own records, marking one house as within the submergence limit and an adjacent one at the same height as outside it. Only 88 families were initially declared eligible, and even they have not been fully rehabilitated.

In Ekalwara, where all 600 houses were affected, nineteen families are still awaiting compensation, with files languishing in Bhopal for years. The report also documents the plight of the Kewat boatmen community, whose traditional ferry rights are being auctioned despite a 2017 order reserving them, and the Kumhar potters, whose brick kilns were submerged without alternative land being provided as promised.

The commission's findings extend to Maharashtra, where Adivasi families in Nandurbar district continue to face submergence of lands that have never been acquired, and where the Grievance Redressal Authority declared 80 families as "tapu affected" only in the last year. In Gujarat, the report highlights the plight of Adivasi families from six villages in the immediate downstream of the dam whose land was taken in 1961 for a pittance—₹60 to ₹200 per acre—and who remain unrehabilitated even after six decades, now facing further dispossession due to the Statue of Unity tourism project, which the commission says violates the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996. The report notes that the Gujarat government has been accused of transferring Adivasi land to a temple trust without informing the rightful owners.

On the environmental front, the commission relied heavily on the 1992 Morse Commission report appointed by the World Bank, which found that the project proceeded on the basis of "an extremely limited understanding of both human and environmental impact, with inadequate plans in place and inadequate mitigative measures under way." That report led to the World Bank's withdrawal from the project.

The People's Commission found that many of the concerns raised in 1992 remain unaddressed. The 2011 final report of the Dr. Devendra Pandey Expert Committee, constituted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, documented serious violations of environmental clearance conditions, including unsatisfactory catchment area treatment, particularly by the Madhya Pradesh Narmada Valley Development Authority, which treated only 38 per cent of the required area against 100 per cent impoundment. 

Compensatory afforestation was found to have largely failed, with independent field checks revealing poor survival rates and non-functional plantations. The report also flags illegal sand mining continuing in violation of Supreme Court, High Court, and National Green Tribunal orders, pollution of the Narmada and its tributaries from untreated sewage and industrial effluents, and the proposed river cruise project from Badwani to the Statue of Unity, which the commission says poses severe risks to the river's ecology and is being pushed despite NGT and Supreme Court orders halting similar projects.

The economic reappraisal in the report is equally damning. It notes that the project's sanctioned cost at approval in 1988 was ₹6,406 crore, which has since escalated to over ₹76,000 crore by official estimates and possibly ₹90,000 crore according to unofficial figures. The commission found that the original economic appraisal by Tata Economic Consultancy Services in 1983 was a "retrofit exercise" aimed at meeting World Bank conditions rather than an impartial feasibility study, and that it severely underestimated resettlement costs—concluding R&R in one paragraph with an estimated cost of just ₹11 crore—while inflating irrigation and power benefits.

The report points out that the benefit-cost ratio of 1.84 calculated in 1983 is now invalid given the massive cost escalation and the fact that irrigation benefits remain unrealised, with over 5,000 kilometres of canal network still incomplete after 45 years. It also notes that power generation has fallen short of projections, leading Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra to demand compensation of ₹904 crore and ₹450 crore respectively, disputes that remain unresolved.

The commission's recommendations are sweeping. It calls for an immediate economic reappraisal of the project based on actual costs and realised benefits, the inclusion of all 15,946 excluded families in rehabilitation rolls, the repeal of the Statue of Unity Act, the maintenance of the reservoir level at the crest level of 121.92 metres until all rehabilitation is complete, and the establishment of an independent statutory resettlement authority with transparent public ledgers.

It also demands that the Narmada Control Authority ensure scientific regulation of water flow through the cascade of dams to prevent unacquired property from being submerged, and that illegal sand mining and the cruise project be stopped immediately. The report concludes that the Sardar Sarovar Project illustrates not merely an economic miscalculation but a systemic governance failure, and that its reassessment is indispensable to ensure project efficiency, social justice, and environmental sustainability.

As the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award completes 45 years and becomes subject to review, the commission urges that any further decisions on dams, barrages, and water redistribution be taken only after an impartial, truthful review of all aspects of the Sardar Sarovar Project, warning that the development paradigm itself must be reconsidered if justice is to be delivered to those who sacrificed their homes, lands, and livelihoods for a project that has yet to fulfil its promises.