"Book Review: “Growth or Development: Which Way is Gujarat Going”, edited by Indira Hirway, Amita Shah and Ghanshyam Shah, Oxford University Press, 604 pages, Price: Rs 1,395.00
'The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report on the state of Gujarat highlighted grave financial irregularities in the administration of the state. The report, which was tabled in the Gujarat Assembly on Friday, showed that irregularities of as much as Rs 25,000 crore were noticed which included Rs 1,500 crore worth of undue benefits to companies like Reliance Petroleum, Essar Powar and Adani Group.
'The Gujarat government has spent more than Rs 7992.47 crore in the last five years on exploration for natural gas in the Krishna-Godavari (KG) basin but the investment has yielded no results since project was launched. This was stated by Gujarat's energy and petrochemicals minister Saurabh Patel in a written reply to an unstarred question by Congress MLA Tejshri Patel... The Return on Investment (RoI) of the GSPC from the KG basin is likely to be negative. Sources in the company said the he cost of the gas, if production starts, is likely to be very high.
'On June 12th the Narmada Control Authority gave the Gujarat government permission to raise the height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam by 17 meters from 121.92 meters to 138.72 meters. The decision has been widely criticized which is seen as favoring Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state Gujarat, at the cost of lakhs of people in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.
'...Well-known University of Chicago scholar, Martha C Nussbaum, a “distinguished service professor of law and ethics”,..has said that human development should be treated more than gross domestic product of a country...
"Lakhs of people displaced by the 300 dams of the Sardar Sarovar Project are victims of a paper-based rehabilitation programme. Their land is their life. If a river driven to monstrous rage will usurp their land, their lives will be devoured too. While the Modi government raises the height to 138.62 metres, 2.5 lakh more will be displaced. Their fate ignored, their voices mute. The battle is over even before it began.
'In a shocking decision on June 12, 2014, the Narmada Control Authority (NCA), headed by the secretary, Union ministry of water resources (MoWR), and which includes secretary of Union ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) and senior officials of four states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, have sanctioned installation of 17 metre high gates on the Sardar Sarovar Dam on Narmada river in Gujarat, taking the effective current height of the dam from 121.92 m to 138.68 m.
"Sardar Sarovar Dam Height Raised in Violation of Law – Non-compliance of NWDT Award and SC 2000 Order. Narmada Bachao Andolan Will Challenge it and Continue to Struggle for Justice.
"Village women carry pots as they walk to collect drinking water from a man-made well in the Sujangadh village of Surendranagar district. In most rural areas, the burden of collecting water for homes falls upon women, who are forced to walk daily in the torrid heat to fulfill this need..."
"...The socio-ecological costs of such a model are irreversible, as exemplified by the case of Adani port & SEZ in Mundra, Kutch. This largest private port in India and one of the largest SEZs in the country did not emerge out of a peaceful process, as the Modi-ites would want us to believe. Instead, it was a result of violent processes in which certain ecologies, social fabric, and local livelihoods were erased for ever.
