Roy’s polemical writing did not end with her criticism of India’s display of nuclear might. She was just warming up.

In February 1999, the Indian Supreme Court lifted a four-year legal stay that had stopped construction of the vast Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river, which flows westward through the central states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat into the Arabian Sea. The dam is a major feature in the Narmada Valley Development Project, a grandiose plan to build as many as 3,200 dams, both large and small, along the Narmada and its tributaries. Despite what Roy has called one of the most spectacular nonviolent resistance movements since Gandhi’s time, work on the most controversial dam project in the country’s history was about to resume.

The Narmada dams have been fought over for decades. Politicians of all parties say they are necessary for irrigation, for power, and for drought relief. Dams are development. Dams are progress. Opponents, spearheaded by the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), the local movement against the development plan, say the dams will drive hundreds of thousands from their homes. It will provide minimum power for at most a few decades, and will cost billions of rupees that the Indian government doesn’t have.
A miserably familiar story, in other words, of dams versus people, development versus democracy. A story that Roy the novelist soon began trying to help rewrite.

Roy visited Narmada valley in March 1999. In June that year she published an essay that was to eclipse the controversy of her anti-nuclear piece. 'The Greater Common Good' is a passionate dissection of the scandal that has unfolded in the Narmada valley over the past two decades. It ranges across the politics, ecology, economics, and, most significantly for Roy the novelist, the personal and emotional stories behind the development plan and the damage it is doing––not only to the people of the Narmada valley, but also, according to Roy, the entire country. 'The story of the Narmada valley,' she wrote, 'is nothing less than the story of modern India. Like the tiger in the Belgrade Zoo during the NATO bombing, we’ve begun to eat our own limbs.'
'You know, it’s such a scam,' she says. Outside, in the muggy, smoggy streets of Delhi, the monsoon has arrived. But it has come too late for many of the people living in Gujarat, who recently had suffered one of the worst droughts in decades. People, cattle, and crops died. The tragedy was a political gift for the dam’s proponents.

'It’s so shocking, what they’re doing,' says Roy. 'Of course they immediately use it [the drought] to say, ‘Look, you guys, if you’d allowed this dam to be built there would not have been this drought.’ And you look at their own maps of . . . where the dam’s water is supposed to go and where the drought is––there’s no overlap. And you know, they used 85 percent of Gujarat’s irrigation budget for the project.'