The dam era in the United States is now over," were the words used by the United States Bureau of Reclamation in a report of May 1994. It was the Bureau, together with autonomous bodies like the Tennessee Valley Authority, that had developed ´super dams´ such as the Hoover Dam, the first of its kind which converted vast desert areas of America into productive lands. It was the success of high dam building in North America which spawned similar massive exercises in concrete and steel elsewhere in the world. Subsequently, the World Bank, the Inter-American Bank, and other lending and develop-ment agencies took the assistance of the Bureau and the TVA in proposing and financing high dams as the harbingers of development for the countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Exactly a year after the era of dams was declared closed in the United States, there met in Kathmandu a planning group to look into the construction of the first high dam in the Nepal Himalaya. The meeting, in the first week of June, was sponsored by the Global Infrastructure Fund (GIF), an agency created by the Japanese government and business to build large infra-structural projects in developing countries.
In attendance at Kathmandu ´s Holiday Inn were water experts from Bangladesh, India and Nepal. Although the programme called for discussion of the "Eastern Himalayan water As the river with the largest flow in the Himalaya a fter the Brahmaputra and Indus, combining as it does the streams of seven massive tributaries lying between Kathmandu Valley and Sikkim, it was natural for the Kosi to command attention. Indo-Chinese relations will have to thaw somemore before doing something on the Brahmaputra´s main channel can be contemplated.
Kosi therefore provides the one opportunity for those who have the money and enthusiasm to build mega projects. The unannounced agenda for the Kathmandu meeting, in fact, was to lay the groundwork for building of the Kosi High Dam. The main ´interested parties´ were India (as promoter) and Japan (as investor).