The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) or ‘Save the Narmada’ movement originated in the 1980s as a protest against the building of dams in the Narmada River, a major waterway flowing across the Indian states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat. The movement was led by a woman, Medha Patkar, and was embraced by poor indigenous people who were displaced due to the dam-building. Whereas the Chipko movement a decade earlier had focused attention on preserving access to forest resources by local people, the NBA insisted that those people whose rights to local resources cannot be protected due to development – of a dam, for example – should be compensated as well as resettled. In this way, economic justice is served. Dam-building, like forest clear-cutting, has a long colonial and postcolonial history in India. By 1999, India had become the world's third largest dambuilder, trailing only China and the United States.

The specific target of the NBA's protests was the development of the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP), the second largest of 30 very massive dams that were part of a larger plan for 3,000 dams in India. Today, the SSP has one of the largest canal networks in the world. The primary rationale for building the dam was to provide irrigation and drinking water, but as a multipurpose dam and canal system, it also produces electrical power.