jun 2nd, 2012
yeah, right. temples of modern india.
into the present as a story sounding like a sigh, waiting for more than 50
years to be told. Who was to know that a straightforward task of collecting
dry facts about a dam visited 54 years ago would bring me face-to-face with
the story of Budhni Mejhan, a Santhal tribal, whose life became a testament
to nation-building in a way that could never have been imagined; who lived
all her life like a pebble trapped under a huge boulder?
I chanced upon Budhni while ferreting out information about the Maithon dam
in Dhanbad district (Jharkhand) bordering West Bengal, which was a high
point of Surjit's itinerary. The third dam of the ambitious, multipurpose
DVC, established in 1948 on the lines of the Tennessee Valley Authority, it
had been inaugurated around the time of the schoolteachers' visit.
After Maithon I could have moved on to Surjit's next destination. However,
a predisposition to stray from the highways of search engines lured me
towards material on DVC's fourth dam at Panchet in Dhanbad district, near
its border with Purulia (West Bengal). The dam was built across the Damodar
river known as the ‘sorrow of Bengal.' Not only was this Rs.19 crore dam
DVC's biggest until then; its inauguration on December 6, 1959 had been
graced by Prime Minister Nehru himself.
a poignant essay on this poor santhal woman;
budhni mejhan is a metaphor for how the nehruvian stalinists have raped and pillaged this country; and they continue to do so today (the most recent incarnation being the evil rasputins of the NAC).
- Sometimes an innocuous request leads you to the past only to snake back
into the present as a story sounding like a sigh, waiting for more than 50
years to be told. Who was to know that a straightforward task of collecting
dry facts about a dam visited 54 years ago would bring me face-to-face with
the story of Budhni Mejhan, a Santhal tribal, whose life became a testament
to nation-building in a way that could never have been imagined; who lived
all her life like a pebble trapped under a huge boulder?
I chanced upon Budhni while ferreting out information about the Maithon dam
in Dhanbad district (Jharkhand) bordering West Bengal, which was a high
point of Surjit's itinerary. The third dam of the ambitious, multipurpose
DVC, established in 1948 on the lines of the Tennessee Valley Authority, it
had been inaugurated around the time of the schoolteachers' visit.
After Maithon I could have moved on to Surjit's next destination. However,
a predisposition to stray from the highways of search engines lured me
towards material on DVC's fourth dam at Panchet in Dhanbad district, near
its border with Purulia (West Bengal). The dam was built across the Damodar
river known as the ‘sorrow of Bengal.' Not only was this Rs.19 crore dam
DVC's biggest until then; its inauguration on December 6, 1959 had been
graced by Prime Minister Nehru himself.
- ... deleted
i am so glad kerala did not have any natural resources (okay, except water). otherwise the stalinists would have dug up the entire state. the one thing that we had, ilmenite/monazite sands, have been quietly shipped out by white countries for the thorium.
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apple once had a tshirt mocking sun microsystems' motto "the network is the computer".
the apple shirt read, "the network is the network; the computer is the computer; sorry for any confusion".
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does anybody know if the tennessee valley authority actually did any good? or was it a fool's errand like the army corps of engineers straightening out the rivers in the florida everglades and causing untold environmental damage? (they recently restored the old meanders of the rivers). it's not clear that the damodar valley corporation did any good.
1 comment:
TVA was of course a fool's errand. It created huge expenditure, needed to be bailed out, did not meet its targets of power generation and the amount of power generated has never justified the amount of money spent. So TVA ends up issuing fishing licenses.
Example of a news item on TVA from 1987:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1987/11/23/69906/index.htm
Biggest boondoggle, biggest bailout
By STAFF Alan Farnham, Frederick Hiroshi Katayama, David Kirkpatrick, Patricia Sellers
November 23, 1987
In 1982 FORTUNE dubbed one plant America's costliest government boondoggle; it was canceled in 1985 after expenditures of $2.6 billion. Capacity exceeds demand by a huge margin. The program signed a long-term contract with the Tennessee Valley Authority to spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year for electric power it doesn't need. Senator Ford's bill, which the Senate Energy Committee has overwhelmingly approved, would create a new government-owned enrichment corporation, buy off the TVA with a lump sum payment, impose a penalty on utilities that buy more than 37% of their uranium abroad, and declare the program's debt to the government to be $364 million. That last provision has opponents howling, since the real debt may be as much as $9 billion, according to figures compiled by the General Accounting Office and trumpeted by the National Taxpayer's Union, a lobbying group. If the $9-billion figure is correct, the Ford bill would represent the biggest industrial bailout ever.
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