Lakes or Rivers?

SIR S. V. RAMAMURTY, the father of the Ramapada Sagar Project, in his radio talk on the Godavari published in the April issue of Triveni, says that the poetry of the Godavari is enshrined in the Ramayana and that the Godavari is eternal. No doubt the materialization of his scheme will bring in an era of plenty, prosperity and light to the people of the Circars. But the law of compensation no less than the ethical is also eternal. Under the working of that law, if we gain certain good things we stand to lose certain other good things of life, perhaps more vital. And it behoves, therefore, the intelligentsia among the public to ponder over the following issues: -

Whether the ‘poetry of the Godavari enshrined in the Ramayana’ will ever be realized by the future generations if reservoir dams are built in its course? When the living waters of the Godavari are impounded by huge reservoir dams, will it be an eternal river, or a series of artificial lakes spoiling the beauty, the freshness and the elusive scent of the free flowing waters of great rivers, with which celestial qualities ‘Apsaras’ are created by immortal poets of old. Unless the beds of the rivers, which have reservoirs and anicuts, are clean swept of accumulating rotten matters and debris, otherwise called silt, will they continue to be Jiva Nadis i.e., living rivers? Will they not become eventually saltwater lakes, if not dead seas? Will the construction of huge reservoir dams insure against such an eventuality?

But then, it raises another problem, not remote, but immediate, one which relates to the health of the people, if the Ramapada Sagar project is materialized. Man covets ease. He does not want to live by the sweat of his brow, when easy means of livelihood are available. So the modern man is paying dearly as a compensation for it with the price of his health. It seems we can’t help it. So the craze for rice-eating has infected even the working-class people; because it is much more easy to prepare rice for food than other cereals. It is common knowledge that the health of the people living in delta tracts, or of the rice-eating people is not so robust as the health of the hard-working people of the high-lands, though the former are more wealthy and refined and easy-going. It is better our leaders and enlightened public see that these uplands grow food crops in abundance, with the help of modern appliances, other than rice, and are not made wet, by canal irrigation, soaked with water almost throughout the year giving rise to paludal, humid atmosphere over these areas.

If you want electricity, and when there are no natural waterfalls to harness, let it be generated by means of steam engines. Getting things cheap by harnessing the rivers by dams is more costly in the end. The great ones cry from housetops, man does not live by bread alone. But they don’t realize what they are doing to posterity. The magnificent natural scenery which adorns the banks of the Godavari from Papi Hills to Bhadradri–a glorious description of which by an English officer you will find in the Godavari District Gazetteer of the early forties of the last century, and which has not fallen to the lot of any Andhra poet to inunortalise, will be lost if the Godavari here will become a Sagar–a sea. Sree Rama or the Poet Valmiki, whoever it be, would not have selected this region for their abode ‘vanavas’ during Rama’s exile, but for its Superb beauty of nature through which the majestic river moves in its music. Will the ‘poetry’ of the river enshrined in the epic be preserved or swallowed up by the construction of the Ramapada Sagar?