Ahead of Modi’s birthday, Gujarat dam delayed water release – despite heavy rain and official alerts

On the morning of September 17, Gujarat’s Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel stood at the Sardar Sarovar dam to offer prayers to the Narmada river on the occasion of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday.

As Patel prayed and posed for the cameras, about 100 km downstream, Barmalbhai Vasava’s house lay submerged under “five feet of water”.

Hours before, water released by the dam had flooded several villages in Narmada and Bharuch districts, including Sarfoodin, where Vasava lives. “Our goats, seeds which we had stored, belongings, we could not save anything,” said Vasava, whose farmlands also got inundated.

The Opposition in Gujarat, in the wake of the floods, has alleged that the dam authorities deliberately refrained from releasing water in a more incremental fashion to ensure a full reservoir on Modi’s birthday.

Scroll investigated the charges. We found that official data from the dam itself shows a pattern of the dam’s reservoir filling up the brim on September 17 almost every year since 2019 when the Gujarat government began an annual ritual of commemorating Modi’s birthday at the dam. The only exception to this pattern was 2021, the year when the Covid pandemic threw normal life out of gear.

In previous years as well, residents living in the floodplains of the Narmada...

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