According to a detailed study of 54 Large Dams done by the Indian Institute of Public Administration, the average number of people displaced by a Large Dam is 44,182. Admittedly, 54 dams out of 3,300 is not a big enough sample. But since it's all we have, let's try and do some rough arithmetic. A first draft. To err on the side of caution, let's halve the number of people. Or, let's err on the side of abundant caution and take an average of just 10,000 people per Large Dam. It's an improbably low figure, I know, but ...never mind. Whip out your calculators. 3,300 x 10,000 = 33 million. That's what it works out to. Thirty-three million people. Displaced by big dams alone in the last fifty years What about those that have been displaced by the thousands of other Development Projects? At a private lecture, N.C. Saxena, Secretary to the Planning Commission, said he thought the number was in the region of 50 million (of which 40 million were displaced by dams). We daren't say so, because it isn't official. It isn't official because we daren't say so. You have to murmur it for fear of being accused of hyperbole. You have to whisper it to yourself, because it really does sound unbelievable. It can't be, I've been telling myself. I must have got the zeroes muddled. It can't be true. I barely have the courage to say it aloud. To run the risk of sounding like a 'sixties hippie dropping acid ("It's the System, man!"), or a paranoid schizophrenic with a persecution complex. But it is the System, man. What else can it be?

Fifty million people. Go on, Government, quibble. Bargain. Beat it down. Say something. I feel like someone who's just stumbled on a mass grave."

Since 1998 BW has been pushing changes to their compulsory boat licenses that threaten boatdwellers' lifestyles by reducing affordability and choice. With residential moorings hard to find as well as expensive and subject to other charges such as council tax, many boat dwellers opt for the continuous cruising license. While the original threats to charge those who cruise the canals almost 2.5 times the previous cruising fee were shelved in the face of protest, BW has continued to tighten up its definitions of what is acceptable continuous cruising in ways likened by boat dwellers to the 1994 Criminal Justice Act. Many of those targeted by BW are the kind of people for whom boat dwelling presents an option for affordable housing.

Canalside developers meanwhile stood to profit from concern over lack of housing, picking up brownfield points by building luxury houses with views of canals that had been kept alive by those now being pushed off them. "Houses close to water fetch premium prices", Pierre Williams of the lobby group the House Builders Federation (HBF) has said. The HBF has supported plans to site nearly a million new homes in the South East of England; one of the many objections to these proposals is that these new developments are built without sufficient investment in necessary infrastructure, putting additional strain on amenities such as schools, hospitals and water supplies.

In a new twist, BW has proposed supplying water to the South East using canals. Although conjuring up visions of the virtually stagnant waters of the canals drunk dry, trials have involved pumping fresh ground water from Birmingham to London. Next year water from the North West and Wales will be pumped via the canals to the overdeveloped South East region, with who knows what hydrological effects. First to welcome the proposals was the HBF. The money brought in is of course unlikely to benefit those for whom the canals are currently home, one of whom commented: "they'd better help us convert to electric and clean the place up".