Damn da dams!
[ My little sis is a prolific writer- short stories, novels, poems, she does them all. This is a piece she wrote while researching for her Social Science project... Check it out!]
They were once regarded as the temples of Modern India by our former PM, Jawaharlal Nehru. They are now regarded as the watery graveyards of many hundred thousand Indian hopes, dreams and aspirations. Yes, they would have become the temple of modern India if the power hungry politicians of today gave a little importance to the ambitions of the common man.
In the India of today, plans for building new dams are being discussed everyday. The reason they are made- for fulfilling the politicians greed for money, for corporate factories and industries and capitalist farms. They are being built too on a massive basis, almost everywhere in the name of service to mankind, in the name of solving the endless water scarcity problems of the common man who is in turn evicted from the land his ancestors tended and is given a piece of barren, uncultivable land in the name of rehabilitation.
Is this the marvelous vision Pt. Nehru had for Modern India? Unfortunately, this is the reality for most of the ppl in India. As the cons of the dams keep outweighing the pros and the scales start tipping in the favour of other methods of water conservation like rain water harvesting ,its high time we realized that dams literally damn the nation to an endless cycle of damnation.
- Shruti Nair