Outsourcing
The village of Tehri faces certain death. When construction of the world’s fifth largest hydropower-producing dam is completed, Tehri (in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand) will be flooded and over 10,000 people inhabiting the surrounding area will lose the place their families have called home for over 200 years. One man refuses to let his home go gently into that good night.
Sunderlal Bahuguna is a slight, wiry man with a full head of snowy hair made even whiter by his bronzed skin. Like most older Indians, his face is neither young nor elderly but lost somewhere in the middle. If it were not for the hair and the permanent crow’s-feet etched into the corners of his eyes, he would appear to be no older than a man in his late twenties. His voice is low and soft and one must lean in to hear him speak over the bubbling of the engorged waterfall-fed stream that now cuts through his back yard.
It was not always like this.
Sunderlal remembers a time when there was enough space behind the sun-faded turquoise house to plant a garden with tomatoes and ladyfingers to feed the Bahuguna clan and their neighbors. He remembers climbing the branches of the mango tree to pluck ripe fruit from its boughs, sharing the succulent fruit with his friends and later, his future wife. Now, the garden lies under three feet of water that continues to rise steadily and the mango tree has died, its roots drowned beneath the gently flowing water. Gently flowing water that continually became more and more aggressive in its ebb and flow until one year, during the monsoon season, the level of the water rose high enough to lap at Sunderlal’s door like a hungry dog begging to be let in.
The dam has been under construction since 1978; its construction exists for the sole purpose of providing hydropower as well as roughly 270 million gallons of potable water to industrialized cities such as Delhi, Uttar Pradesh. But it is not the displacement of Tehri’s people that Bahuguna is exclusively worried about. The dam’s construction is on a fault line roughly 30 miles from the epicenter of a 1991 earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8. If the Indian subcontinent continues to plow into Asia Major, as it surely will, the Tehri dam is in danger of rupturing and releasing billions of gallons of angry, pent-up water onto unsuspecting and unprepared down-stream towns. Furthermore, the dam is a threat to the fragile ecosystem of the Himalayan region in which it is positioned.
As an active member of the Chipko movement—“chipko” loosely translating as “tree hugging”—Sunderlal stresses the importance of creating a sustainable rural habitat that gives control over natural resources to the village people rather than what he, and many others like him, view as corrupt, money grubbing government forces. He rises, crossing the threshold from the porch into the house, as he rummages through filing cabinets that line one wall. The house is bare in the manner that Gandhi encouraged his followers to embrace, the furniture consisting of a platform bed with rumpled sheets, a low table, a desk piled high with papers, and a stove at which Sunderlal’s wife is fixing chai. With a soft chuckle, Sunderlal pulls out a photo of himself and Indira Gandhi, taken the day that she enacted the green-felling ban.
As the sun sets over the top of the mountain, someone asks Sunderlal what he will do when the water completely devours his home. A slow smile spreads across his face and he bobs his head once to the left and once to the right. With a flick of his hand, as if he were shooing the thought away from him like an annoying gnat, he says, “Koi bhat nahin.”
It is of no consequence.
***
