KISAPURINABLE DEVELOPMENT?
PARAGRAPH 1. Kai Kensavaong will never again walk along the muddy lanes of Sop On, the village in southem Laos where she was bom. Her old home now lies at the bottom of a reservoir of brown water created to feed a hydroelectric power plant, the first to be funded by the World Bank for over twenty years. 'I'll never forget that place,' says the 41-year-old villager. "It was my home. I picked my first bamboo stalks there.
PARAGRAPH 2. The World Bank stopped financing hydroelectric dam projects in developing countries twenty years ago because of criticism that such projects were harming local communities and the environment. But Nam Theun 2-a 39-metre high dam on the Mekong River that generates over 1,000 megawatts of electricity - is the showpiece for the bank's new policy of supporting sustainable hydropower projects. For Laos it is part of a longer-term strategy to revitalise the economy and become the battery of South-East Asia.
PARAGRAPH 3. The bank says that lessons have been leamt from the projects of the sixties and
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