Did Ambedkar have anything to do with India's rivers, dams and electricity?
More than most people expect. In the war years his responsibilities in the Viceroy's Executive Council reached beyond labour narrowly defined into public works, water and power, and he took part in the policy conferences that laid out how independent India would manage its rivers and generate its electricity. The idea of treating a whole river basin as a single system — flood control, irrigation and power together — was worked out in this period, with the Damodar valley as the test case, on the model of large multipurpose river schemes elsewhere.
He is associated in particular with pressing for permanent expert bodies rather than one-off projects: a central authority to plan water use across provinces, and a national approach to electric power. The institutions that carried these forward took shape around and after independence, and it would overstate the case to make him their sole architect.
It earns a place here for how far his work reached. He argued about untouchability and about how to dam a river and wire a grid, and treated both as parts of building a country fit to live in.
In the Journey: A party, a war, and a labour portfolio, 1936–1946