Using the scarcity created by the pollution, the World Bank pushed the Delhi government to privatize Delhi’s water supply and get water from the Tehri Dam on the Ganges, hundreds of miles away. A privatized plant that could have been built for 1 billion rupees has cost the public 7 billion rupees. The privatization of Delhi’s water supply is centered around the Sonia Vihar water treatment plant. The plant, which was inaugurated in 2002, is designed at a cost of 1.8 billion rupees for a capacity of 635 million liters a day on a 10-year build-operate-transfer (BOT) basis. The contract between Delhi Jal Board and the French company Ondeo Degremont (a subsidiary of Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux Water Division—the water giant of the world), is supposed to provide safe drinking water for the city.

The water for the Suez-Degremont plant in Delhi will come from the Tehri Dam through the Upper Ganga Canal to Muradnagar in western Uttar Pradesh and then through the giant pipeline to Delhi. The Upper Ganga Canal, which starts at Haridwar and carries the holy water of the Ganga to Kanpur via Muradnagar, is the main source of irrigation for this region.

With this undertaking, the Ganga is being transformed from a river of life to a river of death by the ecological consequences of damming and diversion. The Tehri Dam, located in the outer Himalaya, in the Tehri-Garhwal district of Uttaranchal, is planned to be the fifth highest dam in the world. If completed, it will be 260.5 meters high and create a lake spread over an area of 45 square kilometers of land in the Bhagirathi and Bhilangana valleys. The dam will submerge 4,200 hectares of the most fertile flat land in those valleys without benefiting the region in any way.

Already, the islands of silt are rising faster than the captured water. It is estimated that the life of the dam would not be more than 30 years because of the heavy sedimentation. The Tehri Dam will hold silt, not water, and create floods, not prevent them.

Diversion, too, spells catastrophe. The disappearance of the Ganga in the peak of the summer of 2003 was an experiment allegedly to clean the “ghats” at Haridwar, but designed to test how much violence a society will tolerate as mute witnesses to our own destruction. The people of Uttaranchal, Uttar Pradesh, and Delhi can turn around this violent, abusive experiment and transform the conversion of the lifeblood of our rivers from corporate commodities into an experience for ensuring water justice and sustainability.

The people of Tehri can never be compensated for the uprooting of their lives. The women are still sitting on a dharna (a sitting-strike), refusing to move, even though the government paid contractors to break down the homes to force the people out. All local water development projects in the dam catchment area have been canceled on the grounds that the government has no money and  because every drop of Ganga water must flow into the dam. Nearly a hundred women are said to have committed suicide in the Pratap Nagar area for lack of water, even though the Ganga flows below their villages. As one woman declared, “The Ganga, which was our mother, has become our graveyard.” Privatization of water denies local communities their water rights and access to water.