What about dams and water reservoirs - to build or to demolish them?

The paper deals with the problem arising from the action taken by the World Commission of Dams (WCD) to abandon any activity of planning, designing, building and maintaining large dams stipulating some problems from totally negativistic point of view. Under the umbrella of 'Cost of Dams' they are pointing out the following problems: 1. Millions of people have been displaced from their homes each year from large dams. Many were not resettled and those that were rarely had their livelihoods restored. Compensation has in many cases been either non-existent or inadequate. 2. Impact on communities downstream was often significant and was not addressed adequately in planning and design of large dams. 3. Large dams have had extensive impacts on rivers, watershed and aquatic ecosystems and efforts to mitigate these have met with limited success. 4. While there was variability from one project to next, a considerable portion of large dams have fallen short of physical and economic targets with a high tendency to cost overruns. From the other side, to the above provocative questions the International Commission of Large Dams (ICOLD) did not stayed indifferent but took an active action stipulating all the benefits, as well as the concerns about dams from a general point of view. These steps of ICOLD and the views of the writer of this paper are discussed in the following text. (Original)