The Government of India has detailed figures of how many million tons of food grain or edible oils the country produces. It can tell you how much bauxite is mined in a year of what the total surface area of the National Highway adds up to. It's possible to access minute-to-minute information about the stock exchange of the value of the rupee in the world market. We know how many cricket matches we've lost on a Friday in Sahrjah.
But the Government of India does not have a figure for the number of people that have been displaced by dams or sacrificed in other ways at the altars of ’National Progress’. Isn’t this astounding? How can you measure Progress if you don’t know what it costs and who has paid for it?
But there is an estimate ...
At a private lecture, the Secretary to the Planning Commission said that he thought the number of people displaced by development projects was in the region of 50,000,000 - 40,000,000 of whom were displaced by big dams.
We daren’t say so because it isn’t official. It isn’t official because we daren’t say so. You have to whisper it to yourself, because it really does sound unbelievable.
Fifty million people.
I feel like someone who’s just stumbled on a mass grave.
Fifty million is almost three times the population of Australia. More than three times the number of refugees that Partition created in India. Ten times the number of Palestinian refugees. The Western world today is convulsed over the future of one million people who have fled from Kosovo.
The millions of displaced people in India are nothing but refugees of an unacknowledged war. We are condoning it by looking the other way. Why?
This article was promoting a book ’The Cost of Living ’ by Arundhati Roy. Roy is an Indian activist and writer who won the Booker prize for an earlier novel. ’The Cost of Living’ is published by Flamingo, price £5.99.