PANDIT GOVIND BALLABH PANT MEMORIAL LECTURE: VII ...

consideration the wider impact of impacts on the environment, society and people’s
psyche be avoided.
Smaller Dams are Desirable
Bigger dams are known to engender environmental imbalances and enormous
societal problems, including the trauma of large-scale uprooting of people (Valdiya,
1992, 1997). Since there is no built-in provision for mitigation or elimination of negative
environmental and socioeconomic effects such as restoration of forests, stabilization of
slopes and appropriate and adequate relocation of displaced population, and of sharing
of benefits by communities living in the command areas and upstream of the dams, it
would be better to go in for smaller dams (Figure 7a) which cost less, start giving
benefits quite early, bring greater profits, and cause less damage to or impairment of
environment, croplands and human habitats (Table 2). This is quite evident form the
date (Table 3) collected by the Planning Commission (Singh, 1993).
TABLE 2:
Comparison of a Big Dam with a series of Smaller Dams in a River in the USA
(Odum, 1959)
Mainstream Multiple-head
reservoirs behind water reservoirs
a big dam behind smaller
dams
Number of reservoirs 1 34
Drainage are (sq. miles) 195 190
Flood storage (acre-fee) 52,000 59,100
Surface water for
Recreation (acres) 1950 2100
Flood, pool (acres0 3650 5100
Bottom inundated and
Lost (acres) 1850 1600
Bottom protected (acres) 3371 8080
Total cost $6,000,000 $1,985,000
TABLE 3:
Expenditure on the Benefits from Major and Minor Irrigation Projects, Planning
Commission Statistics
(S.Singh, 1993)
Quality/Expenditure Comulative Potential
(million rupees) (million hactares)
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