The Greater Common Good

The Greater Common Good’ is Arundhati Roy’s stirring and flabbergasting tale of governmental (and international-agency) arrogance, high-handedness, corruption and idiocy. The Narmada Valley in north-western India is home to 25 million people (i.e. half the population of Britain), and over the last twenty-plus years successive federal and state governments have been intent on forcibly evicting these people, flooding the land they’ve farmed for generations in order to build a series of giant dams that will, notionally, then allow irrigation to bring water to those who need it in the region’s cities, allow the land to bear different crops and improve the region’s economy. That local villages and farmers suspected that none of this would follow; that their resistance obliged the World Bank, finally, to commission an independent report that damned the entire project as naïve, incompetent and ill-considered; that each of the goals can be readily proved to be inachievable: none of this has dissuaded the dismissive and disdainful state government (of Gujarat) from pursuing the benighted project to its end, irrespective of the misery already delivered to millions by its botched progress so far.