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The Failure Of The World Bank Essay

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The Failure of the World Bank’s Sardar Sarovar Dam project in India

Lira Samanta

The World Bank is known to fund many infrastructure projects in developing countries, presumably as a means to achieve their goals of increasing development in those countries. Hydroelectric dams are some of the much-maligned infrastructure projects funded by the World Bank. In a report authored by employees of the World Bank itself, the authors themselves highlight the “adverse environmental and related social impacts” of large dams, while attempting to draw a distinction between “relatively good dams and bad dams”. (Ledec & Quintero, 2003)
One example of a hydroelectric dam funded by the World Bank is the Sardar Sarovar Dam in India. The World Bank funded Sardar Sarovar in 1985, approving $450 million in loans for the development of this dam. (Bosshard, 2008)
This development was envisioned as part of the Narmada Valley Development Project, also known as the “Narmada Project”, the scope of which included the provisioning of thirty large dams, 135 medium dams, and 3000 small dams. Of these, the Sardar Sarovar is one of the larger and most publicly troubling projects. The Indian government’s many claims about this dam have included that it would irrigate roughly 1.8 million hectares of land in the state of Gujarat, irrigate 73,000 hectares of land in the nearby state Rajasthan, and provide drinkable water to roughly 8000 Gujarati villages and 125 urban centers. (Narula, 2008)
Despite these

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