DELHI, India, April 19 (UPI) -- An activist's hunger strike has threatened completion of a dam on India's Narmada River unless thousands of displaced people can be relocated.
The Save the Narmada Movement has campaigned 20 years against the multibillion-dollar plan to build 30 dams to relieve the country's water shortages. Hundreds of farmers have committed suicide after their crops failed during droughts. In many areas, the water table could run out.
Medha Patkar, India's most famous human rights activist, began a hunger strike in March but the campaign was initially dismissed as a publicity stunt, the London Independent reported.
Almost three weeks later, national newspapers daily covered the issue, forcing the government to respond.
Though Patkar was taken to the hospital by police, medical staff did not force her to eat. Hunger strikes are deeply respected in India, where they were enshrined in the national consciousness by Mahatma Gandhi.
Patkar's protest is not finished because the Supreme Court has allowed that work on the dam can continue while solutions are sought to accommodate 35,000 families whose homes could be flooded in the coming monsoons.
