Dams at China Border.

Energy-hungry India can neither abandon dams nor embrace the Chinese policy of building many large ones.

The constant clackety droning of drilling machines and excavators punctures the idyllic surrounds of the Temghar dam, some 50 km west of Pune. Opened in 2010, the dam, with a capacity of 3,000 million cubic feet, was a key supplement to the ever-thirsty and fastgrowing Pune city and district.

The Rs 314 crore reservoir is empty. It has been drained to facilitate a Rs 100 crore repair for a dam that leaks 10-12% of its contents due to poor construction. On a mid-November day, when this writer visited the site, the gates to the dam were shut and a handful of workers milled about. On one side, a massive mound of debris lay waiting to be cleared by an excavator that had yet to be pressed into service.

Opposite a gate at the dam’s base, a tea stall owner snagged a couple of customers curious about the dam, but in a rush to head to Lavasa, a new city being built 20 km to the south. “This dam has been forever under construction… there’s nothing here for you to see,” smirked Suresh, the weary tea seller.

Temghar is the kind of fodder that critics of reckless, unchecked construction feed their diatribes on. While large dams in the past have been attacked for displacing large numbers of people, more recent protests have centred around the long-term environmental impact, the top-down decision-making to decide their location that bypassed local communities, and abstruse technical details and hazy economics around dam construction. Once hailed as temples of modern India, when several large projects w ..

Maharashtra is among the top three builders of dams in the country. Underlining the irony is the 148-year-old Khadakwasala dam, next to Temghar, which barely leaks and has survived an inescapable deluge in 1961 and stands strong. The leaky Temghar dam has been problematic since its opening, with leaks springing up rapidly and the state being forced to blacklist its contractors and rush repairs.

Dam Safety

As large dams built just after Independence reach their sell-by dates, tough questions are being raised on whether India needs such aggressive investments in dams. According to estimates, 80% of India’s large dams are over 25 years old, while as many as 170 are 100 years or older. India ranks third globally with 5,254 large dams in operation and 447 large dams under construction.

Few among the older dams, many in need of varying degrees of repairs, many in need of varying degrees of repairs, match current design and safety norms. There are other issues too — one study by the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, estimates that over half of India’s dams are in seismically sensitive zones.

“India is the third largest builder of dams in the world and yet lacks a dam-safety mechanism that is transparent and participative. People who are most impacted by the construction of a dam are often left out of this process,” says Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator, South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP), a civic advocacy outfit. “Operational safety is very important to people who live downstream due to to the looming risk of flooding,” Thakkar adds. Over the past decade, dams across Assam, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Karnataka have been affected by incidents triggered by inadequate focus on operational safety.

Part of the challenge is that the national register of dams, maintained by the Central Water Commission, the nodal agency for dam construction, is often outdated or incorrect because it leans on inputs from states for this compendium. Around 100 dams do not have the year of construction in the registry (so there is no way of telling when it will end its expected life cycle, and maintenance and repairs are hard to plan) and many dams in Sikkim aren’t listed. Experts say India’s administrators are in a rush to build dams to help meet ambitious energy goals, but the numbers don’t necessarily add up. “Large dams promise flood management, irrigation, and hydroelectricity,” says Arivudai Nambi Appadurai, head, India Adaptation Strategy, World Resources Institute (WRI). However, “most large dams in India have not taken into consideration climate projections. If they did, the cost of building would be too high.

Similarly, hydroelectricity is cheap, but construction costs of big hydro and the costs associated with destruction of river ecosystems outweigh the benefits of hydroelectricity.”

Many countries, with the exception of China, are reconsidering the efficacy of dams. The US alone has demolished 1,200 of them, 540 in the last decade, and others like Germany and Spain in Europe and Thailand in Asia are having second thoughts.

The energy conundrum dogging dam construction remains unresolved. India has a power shortfall and is looking for cleaner sources of power to meet ambitious targets — emissions are expected to double by 2030. WRI’s Appadurai thinks more research needs to be conducted to check if dams and hydro power offer a viable solution.

“Innovative methods such as pumped storage and integration of other renewable sources with hydro power to make dams financial viable has found audience in India and China,” he contends. “No country can solely depend on one source, hence India’s plan to increase solar power production along with hydro, coal and gas, and funding innovative technologies for power production and efficiency is a step in right direction.” However, smaller dams such as Temghar are outside the line of fire. In September, India announced plans to conduct a safety audit of some 5,247 large dams across the country.

While a dam safety bill is in the works, this audit will focus on dam break analysis from cracks and floods and decreased water-holding capacity of the structure. Central and state governments are trying to keep pace with safety needs, with the National Committee on Dam Safety and Dam Rehabilitation and Improvement Program working on 225 dams across five states. In August this year, it prepared a disaster recovery plan for dams across the country.

Away from the faltering efforts of projects in Maharashtra, other states such as Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Assam and Uttarakhand have all laid out ambitious plans for dams to bolster hydro-electric power supply. In Kashmir, for instance, there are plans to generate 5,000 MW of hydro power supply from a series of dams. However, translating these plans to actual working dams may be tricky — a `390 crore project in Bihar collapsed hours before it was to be inaugurated by CM Nitish Kumar. Other states have also struggled with projects, beset by charges of corruption and poor construction.

India’s thirst for dams is unlikely to be quenched soon as increasing power generation capacity and improving irrigation for agriculture are national priorities. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Sardar Sarovar Dam in mid-September, the largest in the country, with power to be split among three states and water supply to as many as 9,000 villages. The project was long-delayed and only proceeded with changes to the maximum height and other technical specifications, after a Supreme Court intervention. “Had the work been done (on time), the project would have completed in the 1970s itself. Land would have been fertile and people would not have had water problems,” Modi declared soon after inaugurating this dam. “A massive misinformation campaign was launched against the dam, which is an engineering miracle.”

Infrastructure Issues

Despite these moves, experts say that there may be some areas that aren’t getting enough attention and in the case of older structures, many may be irreparable. For one, silt accumulation at older dams — in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Karnataka — can be as high as 30-40% of the reservoir’s capacity.

“Dams are a critical need in India,” says Upamanu Lall, professor, Columbia University, US, and an expert on dam construction. “However, the canal systems that deliver water stored in the dams are typically in bad shape and, given that there is no pricing for agricultural water, there is also no user based revenue to better manage and maintain these systems. However, rapidly dismantling dams or slowing construction may also be an overreaction,” he stresses. “Given the relatively poor effectiveness of dams and canals in India, it is easy to make the argument that they should be dismantled and discontinued.

However, the right thing to do would be to actively maintain these systems and set up better systems for measured water delivery and payment so that the immense value associated with this infrastructure is unlocked.”

While large states such as Maharashtra and Karnataka may be table toppers in dam construction, the next battlefront may be opening up elsewhere — in the Northeast. While states such as Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim have signed dozens of MoUs to start hydel projects and dozens of MoUs to start hydel projects and dams, many of these initiatives (including Teesta Stage III) have faced delays and deferments in the face of growing opposition from local communities.

While private companies rushed in a few years ago to set up these projects, local officials say their interest quickly cooled, in the face of growing dissent and bad economics. “The community has stood strong and withstood attempts to recklessly set up dams in the state,” says Athpur Lepcha, a former forest minister of Sikkim and president of Affected Citizens of Teesta, a forum fighting the construction of large-scale dams and hydroelectric projects in the Northeast. “These dams are against some tenets of our culture, but are also ecologically disastrous for the region.”

With such protests unlikely to go away anytime soon, the Central and state governments are likely to have their hands full finding an equitable solution to this dam problem.

Courtesy. The Economic Times Magazine dated 26/11/2017

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கே.எஸ்.இராதாகிருஷ்ணன்.

28-11-2017.