Medha Patkar

Medha Patkar trained as a social worker in Mumbai and was studying for a doctorate when she began visiting villages along the Narmada river in the 1980s that were to be flooded by the Sardar Sarovar Dam, one of the largest hydroelectric projects ever built in India. She found that tens of thousands of mostly poor and indigenous families faced eviction with little or no compensation and no clear plan for where they would go, and she left academic life to organise them.

In 1989 she helped found the Narmada Bachao Andolan, or Save the Narmada Movement, which used marches, hunger strikes and sit-ins in the path of the rising reservoir waters to demand that no one be displaced without adequate resettlement. The campaign took the case to India's Supreme Court, delayed construction for years and drew international attention to the human cost of large dam projects, forcing the World Bank to withdraw its funding from the scheme in 1993 after an internal review criticised its resettlement plans.

The dam was eventually completed despite the campaign, and Patkar's critics argued the movement had cost the region badly needed irrigation and power while achieving only partial gains for displaced families. She has continued to campaign on land rights and against forced evictions across India, and has been arrested and beaten by police many times over four decades of protest.