Dam! Dams! in Himachal Pradesh
Himachal Pradesh is being ruined by dams and hydroelectric projects. Somewhere in the halls of the Indian government bureaucracy there must exist a map of how to dam every meter of surging water in Himachal Pradesh and turn them into a chain of placated pools.
To understand the magnitude of this change you have to conceive the state of the rivers in Himachal Pradesh now. The Beas, the Sutlej, the Spiti, and their tributaries in the side valleys are wild, rushing torrents. The sources of these rivers are so high, at 3500, 4000, 5000, and 6000 meters altitude, that the water is dropping constantly and steeply in elevation as it courses downstream. The young mountains that crowd the river banks with sheer cliffs provide a perpetual source of rocks and soil from landslides, the principal form of erosion. The soil in suspension makes the rivers a rich cocoa color and the stones and boulders are ever-present obstacles to their route. Massive amounts of water run downward from rain, snowmelt, and runoff from huge glaciers. As a result, the pull of gravity over the steep descent makes the water tumble and hurl over the rocks. In the setting of the high, stark cliff walls the rivers channel dramatically toward the Indian plains.
There are already a number of hydroelectric projects built in Himachal Pradesh. Some of the projects I have seen are two large dams on the Beas north of Mandi and a dam blocking the Sutlej east of Rampur. There are others. Larger ones are in the works everywhere. When traveling the frenzy of activity on new projects is obvious. Roads are being cut into the cliff walls. In these valleys roadbuilding is a difficult, dangerous, and major undertaking. Nepalese and Indians from other states are brought for the road construction, which consists of blasting road into cliff, clearing away rubble, and installing measures to prevent landslides.
Traveling up the Sutlej, we passed the mouth of the Sangla Valley. I saw a tiny amount of water trickling over the river bed into the rushing Sutlej. That doesn't look right, I thought. In a few minutes we saw the answer. A river of water erupted over the Sutlej from a huge concrete flume built against the side of the mountain. This is the Karcham hydro project. When we went up the precarious road above the Sangla River, we reached a dam at the head of the narrows. No water was running over the dam. Instead, the entire river was diverted through a long tunnel straight through the mountain to generate power and then to be discharged into the Sutlej at Karcham. The miniscule amount of water I saw at the mouth of the Sangla was from the small amount of precipitation runoff into the narrows catchment below the dam.
The irony about seeing all of these hydroelectric projects and high tension powerlines running over this extremely rugged terrain is that the towns and villages I stayed in seemed to have as many or more power cuts than other parts of India I have visited. The incredible amount of energy visible in the rivers of Himachal Pradesh are being harnessed to power other parts of India. I have been told that the Indian government has plans to supply the majority of electrical power in the rest country from the rivers of Himachal Pradesh.
The social services provided to people in the region are severely lacking. I saw a guesthouse owner in the Pin Valley pull his neighbor's tooth with an ordinary pair of pliers at dinner because there was only one dental clinic dozens of kilometers away in Kaza. Near Kafnu I was told that most of the medical needs of the locals was provided by an annual roving tent clinic organized by Himalayan Medical Outreach Organization, an international non-governmental organization based in New York.
Safety appears to be low on the list of concerns. Several days after I travelled through Spiti Valley, a road-dynamiting job went bad and killed a number of people. It also blocked travel up the valley for several days. A power official for the Kinnaur Valley district told me that of the one thousand Nepalese workers hired to build the high-tension powerline towers, two hundred had been killed in the last year or so.
The West has lost its enamor with hydro power as voices have finally convinced people that a dam does not provide everything it promises. Silting is one problem; I was told that one dam in Himachal Pradesh has been rendered useless after it was overrun by silt. With the high amount of erosion in the Himalayas surely this is a major issue with every hydro project.
In India the Narmada Dam in Maharashtra is the high-profile project because of the attention brought to it by writers and grass-roots organizers protesting its construction. The dam construction will displace about a million people. Arundhati Roy and Vandana Shiva have written about the false promises of the dam's construction. Protests occur at Jantar Mantar in Delhi and at the dam site. As the water level has been raised the headlines in the paper have devolved from whether the level should continue to be raised to whether the displaced people have been properly compensated.
In Himachal Pradesh local people have protested as well. There is graffiti at the new hydro project near Kafnu telling the dam builders to go home. Occasionally in the local paper you may see a paragraph about a fight in court about a particular project. Last night I talked to some locals in Manali who lament that their home is being ruined. "They are carving up our mountains," they tell me. There are plans to start building a dam in the nature reserve in the side valley by Manali. The guide with whom I trekked to Kafnu told me that if they ruin his place of birth, he doesn't want to live there anymore. But clearly the locals in this rugged region are not a favored match against the powerful forces pushing hydro power in Himachal Pradesh.
I am just a visitor seeing a place I immediately felt was beautiful. India is changing so fast. She is rushing headlong into her future. It does seem to be a rush, a heady, gleeful rush, with little thought of the consequences. Becoming a power in the world does not need to be at the expense of the national resource. Becoming a power does not need to be done with indifference to what others have learned. I think of Edward Abbey's essay "Down the River", about a rafting trip down the beautiful Glen Canyon before it was dammed and the canyon drowned. I have this awful feeling that I will return to Himachal Pradesh as soon as a year from now and find the place already starkly changed. Himachal Pradesh is a uniquely beautiful place on the planet. Surely India has the power to preserve that beauty.
Note: I am a traveller and not a journalist. I do not have the resources to fact-check while travelling. This story is a record of my observations, impressions, and opinions.
