Arundhati Roy reports from the ground. Not from theoretical premises — from specific rivers, specific villages, specific government offices. While theorists argued about the commons in seminars, the Narmada Valley Development Project was moving to displace half a million people to build a series of dams on the Narmada River.
The project was built on a specific story about development: some people will have to move so that others can have electricity and irrigation water. The greater common good requires sacrifice from particular communities. Progress requires casualties.
Roy refused the story. Not the concept of development — the specific people being asked to disappear so that others could benefit.
What the dams actually did
The Sardar Sarovar Dam, the largest in the Narmada project, was the subject of Roy’s sustained reporting and activism throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The arguments for it were always expressed in aggregate: millions of people would receive water, hundreds of thousands of hectares of land would be irrigated, electricity would be generated.
What Roy documented, relentlessly, was the specific: specific families in specific villages who had been promised relocation and received nothing, or received land that was unusable, or were relocated to sites without water or infrastructure and then left there. The World Bank, which had funded the project, eventually commissioned its own review under Bradford Morse, which concluded in 1992 that the project’s treatment of displaced people was so inadequate that the Bank should withdraw. The Bank withdrew. The Indian government continued.
The pattern Roy identified is not specific to the Narmada. Infrastructure built for one population, displacing another, with the costs and benefits allocated along lines of political power. The people who benefit from the dam — who receive the irrigation water, the electricity — are not the people who are displaced. The people who are displaced are the people whose land was available because they lacked the political power to protect it. The “greater common good” is not actually common. It transfers value from people with less power to people with more.
The commons that was actually there
What made the Narmada communities specifically vulnerable was something that the dam project’s accounting couldn’t see: the commons they had built and sustained over generations.
Forest commons. Adivasi communities — indigenous peoples — in the Narmada Valley had maintained forest governance systems that balanced extraction with regeneration across generations. They knew which trees could be harvested and when, which areas needed to be left alone, how the forest responded to different intensities of use. This knowledge was not written down. It was embedded in practice, in seasonal patterns of use, in the governance discussions of village communities.
When the dam project displaced these communities, it didn’t just move people. It destroyed the governance systems. The knowledge was not transferable to a relocation site. The relationships between the community and the specific territory — the accumulated understanding of how this forest responded to this community’s use — was specific to the place. You cannot take it somewhere else.
Fishing commons. The Narmada River supported fishing communities whose governance of the fishery — the knowledge of where fish concentrated at different seasons, the informal agreements about who could fish where, the practices that prevented overfishing — was similarly embedded in long relationship with the specific river in its specific condition. When the dam altered the river’s hydrology, the fishery governance became irrelevant. The fish populations collapsed.
Water commons. Irrigation systems built and maintained by communities over generations — not state infrastructure, but community infrastructure, maintained by the communities that depended on them — were inundated. The upstream communities who had developed these systems received nothing in exchange for their destruction.
Reporting while they were happening
What Roy contributed that academic analysis could not was the act of being there while the enclosures were happening, documenting the specific human cost in terms that would not let readers look away. Her collection The Greater Common Good (1999) and her later work on the dams transformed public understanding of what development economics’s aggregate numbers actually meant in specific places.
Her method was not neutral. She was a witness, not an analyst. She stood with the Narmada Bachao Andolan — the Save the Narmada Movement — which had been organizing resistance to the dams since the 1980s. The movement combined legal challenges, direct action, hunger strikes, and the strategic use of international attention. It delayed some projects. It won compensation for some displaced people. It forced a level of public accountability that the project’s planners had not anticipated.
What the movement documented, alongside the injustice, was the communities’ own capacity for governance. The village assemblies, the women’s leadership, the intergenerational knowledge transmission, the collective decision-making about how to resist — all of this was commons governance under maximum pressure. Not the romantic commons of theory, but the actual commons of people who had governed shared resources for generations and were fighting to continue doing so.
The continuity
Roy’s broader argument, developed across decades of writing, is that India is not a single story but a class struggle happening simultaneously in multiple registers. The enclosures of the Narmada are continuous with the enclosures of urban land, of mineral resources, of forest territories across tribal India. Each enclosure invokes the greater common good. Each one transfers resources from the most marginalized to the most powerful.
And in each space of enclosure, communities keep building. The forest rights movement — which culminated in the Forest Rights Act of 2006, recognizing the land rights of forest-dwelling communities for the first time — emerged from exactly the kind of organizing the Narmada movement represents: sustained, local, specific, connected to a larger analysis of whose interests the state represents. The Act has been imperfectly implemented, frequently undermined, and still contested. It also represents the largest land rights reform in Indian history, won by communities that refused to disappear.
The commons they never stopped building was not just an economic arrangement. It was an insistence — repeated against every pressure to abandon it — that the people who had governed these resources for generations had governance rights that development accounting had no right to override.