Medha Patkar

Medha Patkar (born December 1, 1954, Bombay [now Mumbai], Maharashtra state, India) is an Indian social activist known chiefly for her work with people displaced by the Narmada Valley Development Project (NVDP), a large-scale plan to dam the Narmada River and its tributaries in the Indian states of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. An advocate of human rights, Patkar founded her campaigns on two basic tenets in the Indian constitution: the rights to life and to livelihood.

Born to socially active parents, Patkar grew up in an environment imbued with a sense of social justice and freedom. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in science from Ruia College in Mumbai and earned a master’s degree in social work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in the early 1980s.

The background to Patkar’s activism took place during the 1960s and early ’70s, when the Indian government was promoting dam building as a route to modernization. The harnessing of river water was to provide water for drinking and irrigation and for generating electricity in impoverished areas. It would also, however, displace hundreds of thousands of people. In 1979 the NVDP—which proposed the construction of thousands of dams on the Narmada and its tributaries—was granted approval. In 1985 Patkar visited villages in the Narmada valley that were to be submerged after the completion of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in southeastern Gujarat, one of the largest of the planned projects. There she became aware of indifference exhibited by local government officials toward the people affected by the project. In 1986 she and her supporters organized marches and protests against the local government entity that was seeking financial grants from the World Bank for the Sardar Sarovar project. In that same year Patkar established the organization Narmada Dharangrastra Samiti, which in 1989 became the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; Save the Narmada). The NBA’s major aim was to provide project information and legal representation to the concerned residents of the Narmada valley.

Through the NBA, Patkar sought help for those rendered homeless and without livelihoods because of the construction of the Sardar Sarovar and other large dams along the Narmada. In 1990 Patkar led NBA members and some 3,000 people displaced by dam projects on a march from northern Madhya Pradesh toward the Sardar Sarovar dam site, but they were stopped at the Gujarat border by police and pro-dam activists. However, after further protest and opposition, including hunger strikes, Patkar and the NBA achieved a breakthrough in 1993 when the World Bank withdrew from the project.

In 1996 Patkar founded the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), an agglomeration of progressive social bodies opposed to globalization policies. She was a representative to the World Commission on Dams, the first independent global advisory body on dam-related issues of water, power, and alternatives; the commission was set up in 1998 and in 2000 issued its influential final report, which contained recommendations on improving development outcomes. Patkar also worked with local communities to develop alternatives for energy generation, water harvesting, and education, and she created a system of residential and day schools in villages of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat. She was recognized internationally for her work.

In 2014 Patkar joined the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP; “Common Man’s Party”), and later that year she ran for the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament) but was defeated. She resigned from the AAP in 2015.