The Narmada is India's largest westward-flowing river and is of immense religious and cultural importance to the people living on its banks. It is also the subject of the largest river development project in the world, the Narmada Valley Project, which envisages the construction of thirty large and hundreds of small dams along its length.

Two of the largest proposed dams, Sardar Sarovar and Narmada Sagar, are already under construction, the former supported by a US$450 million loan from the World Bank. Between them the dams will displace 300,000 people, largely poor peasants and tribals, and cause immense ecological damage through the inundation of forests, including prime habitats of rare species. There is not the remotest prospect that the displaced people, the 'oustees', will be adequately resettled, nor that the ecological damage can be compensated for. There are also real doubts, borne out by the experience of large dams elsewhere in India, that the dams will yield their projected benefits of hydropower, irrigation and drinking water. The project is set fair to become another human and ecological 'development tragedy'.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) is the people's movement that mobilised itself against this development in the mid- and late-1980s. It has succeeded in generating a debate across the sub-continent which has encapsulated the conflict between two opposing styles of development: one massively destructive of people and the environment in the quest for large-scale industrialisation; the other consisting of replicable small-scale activities harmoniously integrated with both local communities and nature.

Medha Patkar is a graduate in social sciences who moved to live among the tribals of the Narmada Valley in the mid-1980s and alerted them to the fate that awaited them with the dams. She was an important catalyst for the formation of the NBA, of which she is one of the principal spokespersons. In a great confrontation between NBA supporters and pro-dam forces in 1991, her 21-day fast brought her close to death.

Baba Amte, born in 1914, is one of India's most respected social and moral leaders. Most of his life he has devoted to the care and rehabilitation of leprosy patients. His community of 2,000 patients at Anandwan is known and respected around the world and has done much to dispel prejudice against the victims of leprosy. In 1990 he left Anandwan with the words: "I am leaving to live along the Narmada... Narmada will linger on the lips of the nation as a symbol of all struggles against social injustice."
Baba Amte died in 2008.

In place of the dams NBA calls for an energy and water strategy based on improving dry farming technology, watershed development, small dams, lift schemes for irrigation and drinking water, and improved efficiency and utilisation of existing dams.

The Narmada projects are the epitome of unsustainable development. Victory for the NBA over the Narmada dams would be a great achievement for sustainability and a reprieve from homelessness and refugee status for several hundred thousand people.