Environment : A River, a Dam--and an Old Man’s Last Battle : The Baba Amte has decided to die in a ghost village doomed to be flooded by a super-dam. He makes no speeches, but his frail presence has rallied conservationists and shaken the halls of government.

His bones decay a bit more each day, as he gazes from his bed at the river and the people of the little village doomed by progress.

He issues no directives, delivers no speeches and plans no protests. He cannot sit up and can barely walk, the legacy of an incurable, degenerative bone disease that already has claimed six of his vertebrae.

And yet, simply by lying still on the dusty banks of the threatened Narmada River, in the heart of a village that is to be drowned by one of the world’s largest dam projects, the 76-year-old Baba Amte has quietly become a worldwide living symbol of protest for conservationists and environmentalists.

This deceptive stillness is just his way. As the sun set over the Narmada one recent afternoon, he compared himself to a child’s top. “When it is spinning the fastest, it appears to be standing perfectly still,” he said.

“Now, I hope the world will listen to the deafening sound of my silence.”

And well it has.

In the two months since the Baba Amte moved into this ghost village near the western Indian town of Barwani as a symbolic protest against large dam projects in India and throughout the world, he has been hailed as a living saint of the environmentalist movement.

“You have lit a torch which will burn forever in the hearts of millions of young men and women,” M. S. Swaminathan, president of the Paris-based World Conservation Union, declared in a March 15 letter praising the Baba’s protest.

The Baba has promised to remain in Kasarawad until his death. Already, his mere presence here has caused the Indian government to rethink the massive $3-billion Narmada River Valley project, a World Bank-funded plan that envisions 32 large dams, two of them referred to as “super-dams,” and more than 3,000 small-scale projects along the 400-mile course of the river.

His name alone has become a singular war cry for grass-roots environmental movements elsewhere in India, ranging from those attempting to save forests and clean up the horribly polluted Ganges River to those trying to stop chemical and fertilizer plants in villages unprepared for their hazardous waste.

And, increasingly, the Baba’s arguments against huge dam projects, which were once viewed as the panacea for drought and power shortages the world over, are forcing some officials to rethink that approach to development in the Third World.

“You are making India and the rest of the world awake to the possibilities still open to us for developing a conservation society based on principles of ecology and equity,” Swaminathan added in his letter to the Baba in March.

Privately, World Bank development experts conceded that they and the Indian government are now considering fundamental changes in the Narmada Valley project, in part because the Baba has thrown his weight behind the cause.

Although he is physically frail, he refers to his age as “the golden years of my youth.” And even before he decided two years ago to dedicate his remaining years to the environment, Baba Amte’s image carried substantial international weight.

Since he laid the first cornerstone of his leprosy ashram in the western Indian state of Maharashtra in 1949, the Baba has spearheaded the causes of the oppressed and powerless in the world’s second-most-populous nation. As his influence grew, his followers began referring to him as Baba, which is Hindi for “father” and has come to mean “wise elder.”

He focused specifically on lepers, having established five large centers to cure leprosy patients from throughout India, and his social work won him this year’s Templeton Prize for progress in religion--a $290,000 cash award to be presented this month at a ceremony in London that the Baba has said he cannot attend.

And last year, the Baba became the first Asian to win the United Nations Human Rights award, taking a place in history alongside Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

“I took to leprosy because I knew that man all over the world was being punished for no fault of his own, and no one symbolized this as much as the lepers, those who walked alone in the world,” the Baba said as he lay in his simple bamboo bed a few feet from the Narmada.

“Through leprosy, I tried to make the world see the greatness of all men, even the weakest. After all, these eyes that see beauty in broken monuments, palaces, fortresses and tombs like Taj Mahal, could not see the same beauty in the ruins of man.

“But after working with these people for four decades, I started looking outside, and it was then I realized the truth.”

Outside the walls of his ashram, the Baba said, he saw a land increasingly threatened by its inhabitants. He saw a country that has become an environmental disaster area, home to the worst industrial accident in history. He saw a leprosy of the planet itself.

The 1984 gas leak that killed more than 3,600 people living near Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal was merely the most dramatic illustration of the situation in a nation where dangerous chemical plants routinely have been built near squatters’ areas and residential neighborhoods--in part due to politics, in part to corruption.

New Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta are all among the most polluted cities on Earth. The Ganges River, considered by most Indians to be a holy life force, is choked with human and industrial wastes, and it was only in the late 1980s that the Indian government started an ambitious project to clean it.

In every case, the Baba said, he saw “man’s lust for money and power” as the cause of India’s environmental nightmare.

“I realized that physical leprosy is perfectly curable and that it was this mental leprosy that was so horrible,” he said. “It is this invisible leprosy of greed and ambition that is turning our world into a wasteland.” The Baba began in earnest in July, 1988 when he convened a meeting of India’s top scientists, civic planners, social activists, politicians and journalists at his ashram in Anandwan, Maharashtra.

They sat for days in a large hall on white sheets and discussed the state of Planet Earth. At the end, they drafted a document that has become the cornerstone of India’s burgeoning environmental movement.

Entitled, “The Anandwan Declaration Against Big Dams,” the group concluded that the “super-dam” projects planned for India and other Third World countries were the perfect symbols for the environmentalists’ crusade.

“We consider (big dams) symbols of destruction in the name of development,” the Baba’s group declared. “They delude people by promising benefits which do not accrue to them. The reliance on big dams is symptomatic of the unthinking acceptance of the dominant world models of economic growth.”

The Baba then set off across India in a bus bearing the sign “Peace by Peace Mission”--a yearlong crusade to take the anti-dam movement into India’s smallest, most remote and yet most directly affected villages, until, finally this year, he decided to concentrate all his efforts on the Narmada project.

It is, he said, a classic case in point.

Advocates of the ambitious dam project within the World Bank and the Indian government argue that the super-dams are the only permanent solution to perpetual cycles of drought that plague many regions of the Narmada River Valley. And they insist that, as in any major development project, the benefits far outweigh the sacrifices.

The Baba and his growing throng of supporters--among them the government’s new deputy environment minister, Maneka Gandhi--sharply disagree.

They concede that the super-dam project will irrigate some of the region and provide enormous power that will draw industry and jobs. But the price, they said, is higher than the return.

Together, the dams will submerge about 325,000 acres of land--more than one-third of it rich forest that is among the little remaining in a nation devastated by centuries of deforestation. They will also displace as many as 300,000 people, many of whom are earning a decent wage by farming already fertile land.

“What kind of world is this that you need millions of gallons of water to fill your swimming pool, to wash your car, to make chemicals that will pollute what water remains, when so many millions cannot even find enough water to wet their lips?” the Baba asked.

The Baba speaks in metaphor and allegory to describe most things in the world--even his own life and death.

He was born Devidas Murlidhar Amte on the day after Christmas in 1914, the son of a wealthy civil servant and landlord. “My mother was on a train going across India and had to get down to give birth to me,” he said. “I have been a nomad ever since.”

It wasn’t until many years later, however, that the Baba renounced his middle-class roots. He went to the best schools, got his law degree and practiced for several years as an attorney in British-ruled India until he discovered that “the law is there to serve the greed and lust of the rich and punish the greatness of the common man.”

It was the year of India’s independence in 1947 that the Baba declared to his wife-to-be that--on their wedding day--he would burn his law degree. And it was on his honeymoon that the Baba first laid eyes on the Narmada River, where he intends for his life to end.

“So now, it is here that I have chosen to spend my last days inhaling the fragrant dust of my bones,” he said, beaming the huge grin that has become his trademark.

“When I am covered by the mother river, the name Narmada will linger on the lips of the nation, and I will live eternally with this great river.”

Gurus of the Environment

Some of the people who stand as symbols of environmental concern around the world:

* David Brower: Founder of Earth Island Institute and Friends of the Earth, former head of Sierra Club. . . Sometimes called the father of modern environmentalism and often compared to Henry David Thoreau. . . Fought many battles to preserve the Grand Canyon, helped create national parks in Kings Canyon, North Cascades, the Redwoods. . . “The resources aren’t there to ransack any more,” he says. “We’re killing our planet.”

* Jacques Cousteau: Ocean explorer, film maker, major figure in the study of the world’s oceans. . . He helped invent the scuba apparatus that allows humans to breath air while swimming with fish. . . Founder of the Cousteau Society, he heads a cinematic and publishing empire that has produced 60 books, 90 films and TV programs. . . “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” series has spun tales of the ocean for hundreds of millions of people. Nearing 80 and frail, he seldom dons a wet suit any more.

* Petra Kelly: Founder of West Germany’s Green party, the blueprint for many environmental political movements worldwide. . . Elected to West German Parliament, she helped bring radical Greens into mainstream politics. . . With environmentalists and anti-nuclear roots, party fights pollution, heavy industrialization and foreign missiles on German soil. . . Born to German mother and Polish father, educated in the U.S., she is fluent in English and media-savvy.

* David Bellamy: British botanist, writer, broadcaster and international authority on plant life and the environment. . . Founder of the Conservation Foundation, author of 14 books and some 80 scientific papers. . . He has written and presented over 300 television programs on the environment, many of them for children. . . First hit the headlines in 1969, when he was consulted about the disastrous Torrey Canyon oil spill off the English coast.

* Lester Brown: Director of nonprofit Worldwatch Institute, which monitors planet’s air, water, soil and population. . . Speaking softly, he delivers an apocalyptic message: Without radical action, the world could see famine, drought, power blackouts and food riots. . . “Food scarcity is going to be the first global indication that we are in serious trouble,” he says. . . Saving the planet “is going to take an enormous amount of money.”