TVA Around the World
Hart, Henry C.
TVA Around the World by HENRY C. HART "President Tito Visits 'French TVA'," "A TVA for the Khuzestan Region," "Colombia's TVA Gets the Green Light"—these are among last year's headlines from the...
...Can we add it still...
...Perhaps, as some entirely dispassionate American political scientists believe, the tie of the land and the minerals to the river that drains them is not made by nature, but by imaginative men...
...Flood control, irrigation for sugar cane and rice, a new highway down to the Pacific, and new industries are coming with the dam...
...DVC had bought it at a bargain and it was still inexhaustible...
...Andrew Komora, once construction engineer at Norris Dam, has now finished his sixth year, and sixth dam, as chief engineer of the DVC...
...In six months, as actual head of an Indian government agency, he had produced a plan for "The Unified Development of the Damodar River...
...Lord Wavell's reaction broke directly away from the normal strategy of empire...
...it will send 90,000 kilowatts into the booming city of Cali in the heart of the valley...
...If we are successful here," Franklin D. Roosevelt told Congress in calling for TVA, "we can march on, step by step, in a like development of other great natural territorial units within our borders...
...The confidence of accomplished results, as well as the techniques, equipped them to win support for a TVA counterpart back home...
...who thought a minor provision of the Indian bill departed needlessly from the language of the TVA act...
...Ambassador Norman Makin of Australia, whose government had asked him to get information for the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority...
...The utterly pragmatic loan examiners sent out by Bank Chairman Eugene R. Black want irrigation, and kilowatts, and increased productive capacity for every dollar they invest...
...the U.S...
...The variety of jobs being done on river valley development abroad by other former TVA people is suggested by even a small sample: Carl A. Bock, chief engineer, and from 1953, head of the Water Resources Authority of Puerto Rico...
...He declared with pride, "The bill that is now before this House is modeled on the provisions of the Tennessee Valley Bill which was passed by the Congress of the U.S.A...
...To quote Black's reasoning: "The Bank places particular stress upon the assurance of adequate management for the project...
...World War II was closing in on India in July 1943 when the Damodar River burst its levees...
...It was a large manganese-steel casting— the jaw of a heavy-duty rock crusher...
...But just about now dirt will begin to move on the first Khuzestan dam in a gorge of the Diz River 150 miles north of the Persian Gulf...
...Sudhir Sen, as general manager of the Damodar Valley Corporation, repeatedly used TVA experience in solving his agency's problems...
...But you can do it and keep running your own government, too...
...So far, I hope this report makes plain, our example, our people, our ideas have been influential abroad at the level of policy decisions, and not just engineering techniques...
...As in TVA, the river will be made to serve a complex of agricultural and industrial developments already authorized to be built halfway down from the dam to the Persian Gulf...
...Meanwhile, other men, sophisticated in Indian administration and politics, had taken up the cause...
...more important, how to select and plan and make use of the whole gamut of resource improvements...
...To the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, he sent off a preliminary proposal to store the floods for hydro-electricity and irrigation...
...When he showed me around the half-finished Maithon Dam, speaking proudly of the young Indian engineers who had taken command, he chuckled over one curious TVA contribution...
...At one point, the proposal said flatly, "The nearest parallel to the Damodar is in the Tennessee Valley, U.S.A...
...Electricity plus Soviets equals communism, said Lenin...
...The giants— the Indus, the Nile, the Rhine—like our own Ohio and Missouri, are too big to encompass with a unified development...
...It is not a big river, but the flood struck at a crucial time, destroying 200,000 acres of rice, cutting the rails to Calcutta, and sharply intensifying the horrible Bengal famine...
...The dams they are building now are bigger than ours, much bigger...
...The TVA idea has fit best the hitherto slightly exploited river basins in nations (or even empires), having some means, some markets, and some qualified men, but wanting more...
...In this connection, the Bank has frequently insisted, in the case of government projects, that their operation be entrusted to a quasi-autonomous authority, or in some other fashion be insulated from political pressures and the rigidities of government administrative procedures...
...TVA Around the World by HENRY C. HART "President Tito Visits 'French TVA'," "A TVA for the Khuzestan Region," "Colombia's TVA Gets the Green Light"—these are among last year's headlines from the New York Times and Time which illustrate a semantic development Julian Huxley noted 15 years ago: "In almost every country, the initials TVA stand for the multiple use of a single river to meet all the needs of man...
...When the Lilienthal-Clapp plan came in, the decisive Ebtehaj promptly commissioned their firm to build it...
...What an ironic sequel this 25th anniversary of that eloquent message reveals...
...Abdullah Khan, president of the Helmand Valley Authority in Afghanistan...
...Coordinator of the international planning, design, and construction group in Iran is another TVA alumnus—John B. Blanford, Jr., former general manager...
...It was a brutal aspect of the poverty of India when she attained independence that only in one small valley, the Damodar, could she afford a plan to stop floods...
...That the initials of an American agency should be the word by which most men everywhere refer to intensive river development is itself something of an achievement...
...The first dam is almost finished now...
...In his ten years at TVA he had had the opportunity to create for himself a then new profession— that of planning engineer...
...You can do what we did using your river and your soil...
...From the petrochemical point of view," said Lilienthal last October, "this area resembles the Gulf Coast 25 years ago, except its resources are greater...
...By 1962 it will be storing water to irrigate an eventual 250.000 acres and generate 80,000 kilowatts of power...
...What we prosperous Americans are liable to overlook is that the power of TVA to inspire men abroad, now that we are turning our backs on it at home, comes from precisely the same identification, carried one vital step farther...
...What are the sources of TVA's apparently limitless influence overseas...
...After sizing the stone for Norris Dam's concrete, it was sold to Shasta in California...
...The TVA has been taken as a model, first, for rivers of middle size...
...A refinery will process sugar from the irrigated plantations...
...The first industry will be a plant turning out nine million pounds of plastics per year...
...The man who went was William L. Voorduin...
...I think it is the demonstration of their TVA performance that they can put fine technical skills to the service of public aims and economic transformations that reach way beyond engineering...
...And once the value of the development of related resources has been demonstrated, nationwide programs tend to spring up —soil conservation, encouragement of small industries, rural electrification, adult education, and many more...
...Only satellite countries will do what we, or the Communists, say is good for them...
...That phrasing of the title is the hallmark of the TVA influence on river engineering around the world...
...Who will teach the world the lesson for the next round of development: how to organize the programs pioneered by the valley authorities on a national scale, how to reach the little watersheds, how to plan for the giant rivers...
...What the engineers and the lawmakers from poor countries hear when they drive out of Knoxville and stop at a hillside farmhouse is, at bottom, this: "We were poor, too, 25 years ago...
...Perhaps the intensive development of a river, apace with the related development of forests, farms, and minerals which can be tied in with it via hydro-electricity, or transport, or irrigation, or watershed protection, is inherently a pilot plant operation...
...We can sample that view authentically in the case of India—a nation which is not underdeveloped in recording and publishing its political decisions...
...It is interesting, too, that the TVA idea has been most usable in semi-developed nations...
...Of all the things that are done to develop a poor country, dams, canals, and transmission lines have the greatest power to catch the eye—and the imagination...
...The wartime British governor of Bengal was an action-minded Australian, R. G. Casey...
...In 1955, after each had served as an international consultant on a highly delicate mission, Lilienthal on the Indus River which flows from India through Pakistan, and Clapp on the Jordan, they teamed up with an experienced international investment banking firm, Lazard Freres, to establish the Development and Resources Corporation...
...They saw how it had been done, not only the concrete and the steel, but the wording of the law...
...Certainly there is one powerful force working for valley authorities abroad which is missing at home— the World Bank...
...His skill was in the strategy, not merely the tactics, of using a river...
...and the relaxed, man-to-man way the TVA-paid assistant county agent talked phosphates with a Cumberland Mountain farmer...
...We always had been...
...International Cooperation Administration...
...Without making a search of the record of laws transplanted among nations, I doubt whether there are many analogies to this situation...
...The use India has made of the TVA example is, by now, greater still...
...government, author of the experiment, has stood still...
...the chief civil engineer of Uruguay's Rio Negro Project...
...In the first ten years after the war, TVA had 12,000 visitors from 90 countries...
...But the dramatic look of TVA has been given a limitless reach and a profound as well as a sharply-defined meaning by the articles, books, and speeches of David E. Lilienthal and Gordon Clapp, and the band of professionally competent crusaders who worked for TVA...
...Now Russia, and soon China, will be pushing us hard as exemplars to the nations on how to use the water in their rivers to break loose from the immemorial circle of poverty, wasted resources, and human frustration...
...Beneath their propaganda, Russia and China appeal to underdeveloped nations as models because they can say, "you can do it, too...
...He is the author of "The Dark Missouri" and "New India's Rivers...
...Independent countries will accept what we have demonstrated is good for us...
...A satirist of contemporary ideologies would certainly find it amusing that these semi-developed countries, some of them addicted to a socialist ideal, have employed a businesslike, corporate organization for their new river developments, while business-oriented America leans on the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the National Rivers and Harbors Congress...
...What is it that commends men like these not just as consultants or contractors, but to carry some of the responsibility of the governments that hired them...
...He released $38 million of Iran's oil money to get the project started...
...But has TVA given more than its name to foreign projects...
...What we need to answer that question is the view of foreign political leaders themselves—the men who planned and legislated the projects...
...The roster, far too long and varied to list here, certainly begins with Lilienthal and Clapp...
...A. A. Meyer, chief design engineer, and William J. Hayes, technical adviser, of the Cauca Valley Corporation in Colombia...
...Director Abol Hassan Ebtehaj of the Iranian Plan Organization called on their corporation in 1956 to see what could be done with the barren southwest corner of his country, Khuzestan, one of the hottest places inhabited by men...
...What these hundreds of engineers, planners, and law makers saw in TVA was a demonstration of work their countries needed...
...To this now desolate spot will come a sure water supply from the reservoirs above, electricity from the thermal plants at the Abadan refineries (even before the dam is complete), and an enormous supply of piped-in natural gas...
...And so, as for the Damodar, the Cauca, the Ping River in Thailand, the Litani River in Lebanon, the Bank itself has insisted on making its loan to a regional, businesslike agency—an agency like TVA...
...The Lilienthal-Clapp firm is now deeply involved in another TVA-like enterprise in Iran...
...Sudhir Sen, sent from his post at the Indian embassy in Moscow to Knoxville to observe HENRY C. HART, associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, has long been a specialist in river valley development...
...To take the first steps from poverty and tradition, a single-purpose development may stretch a nation's capacity—the old British Gezira irrigation scheme on the Sudanese Nile may seem a more appropriate model than TVA...
...James B. Hayes, chief engineer of the 1948 Palestine Commission, and Van Court Hare, engineer for the 1953 U.N...
...So far, too, no country has built a second project of the TVA pattern...
...We once showed men from every country that we could add something to electricity to equal democracy...
...In 1948, when the bill creating the Damodar Valley Corporation reached the floor of the Indian legislature, shrewd minister N. V. Gadgil prepared for the job of steering it through by watching a TVA movie...
...Prime Minister Nehru consulted two former chairmen of TVA, Arthur Morgan and David E. Lilienthal...
...Little watersheds are developed as features of agricultural or city water supply programs...
...The TVA's alumni are, indeed, the second great source of its influence abroad...
...Two years later Voorduin left India in the midst of the bloody Hindu-Muslim riots, afraid that his fore-sighted scheme was lost in the birth-pangs of the new nation...
...the TVA model, went home to negotiate the agreement with the two Indian states through which the Damodar flows...
...John P. Ferris, in general charge, to 1957, of the work in southern Asia of the U.S...
...In that we have a precious advantage over the Russians in any free country...
...Dictators have imposed foreign models often enough, and former colonies have copied the mother country...
...Her larger rivers had to be harnessed initially for irrigation and electricity, which would pay out in money, not lives...
...At least eight nations have "marched on" consciously to apply the lessons of TVA to their rivers...
...Projects for hydro-electricity, irrigation, and flood control, incidentally, have received more loans from the Bank (close to one billion dollars) than any other type of project...
...Against the recorded opposition of British interests who would lose not only prestige but probably design and equipment contracts for the project, he cabled the British ambassador in Washington to enlist a TVA engineer to come to this British colony, not on a flying consultant trip, but to stay and design the engineering harness for the Damodar...
...First, certainly, its high visibility...
...He spent two years, 1952'1954, making a special study of the river systems of India...
...Advisory Commission, to plan development of the Jordan Valley...
...The TVA's pioneers set up shop at 50 Broadway, not many doors off Wall Street...
...But to search the world, and take from a country with which you have had no previous relations a pattern for an agency, an engineering plan, a form of intergovernmental relations, and a statute, is something else again...
...The highly developed countries of western Europe, and even Japan, have found their river valleys already committed to earlier navigation, or hydro-electric development, or water supply, or irrigation, or transport, or industrial uses too far-reaching to incorporate into a unified plan centered on the river...
...The Development and Resources Corporation had never before accepted construction responsibilities...
...Some were tourists...
...Lilienthal put the new firm to work advising the government of Colombia how it could exploit the water and power of the Cauca River to open up for farming and industry a beautiful valley high on the western slopes of the Andes...
...The only criticism that argument drew was from an M.P...
...President Aleman of Mexico and his Secretary for Hydraulic Resources...
...The valley authority may have extended its lessons without extending its form...
...There may even be some wry humor in the profligate manner in which the House and Senate Appropriations Committees still finance domestic dams, as compared to the hard-boiled insistence on results of an international "give-away" agency...
...In fact, with your demonstration farms and co-ops, and your unions, and your new schools, you can do it better that way...
...But others were men like the directors of the Corporacion Autonoma Regional del Cauca (Colombia...
...I think it is possible, by examining the record of the export of the TVA idea, to come close to explaining this paradox...
...We need to go back fifteen years to the genesis of India's TVA— the Damodar Valley Corporation...
Vol. 22 • May 1958 • No. 5
