Tennessee Valley Authority: Rivers and social development

Abstract

We are now accustomed to seeing large dams as highly contentious and their costs and benefits being hotly debated. This essay attempts to create awareness of a time when they were the source of great hope. The India Prime Minister Nehru described large dams as temples of modernity, repositories of the spirit of a new age when it was possible to think that the world’s problems could all be solved by harnessing the benefits of new technology. Were those ideas simply wrong or are there things we can rescue from the past? Show more