´´You love electricity, we love soil," reads a slogan at the construction site of the Tehri Dam, one of India´s most ambitious and controversial hydro electric projects. To be finished by 1997, the 200 million dollar dam on the Hima-layan river Bhagirathi will generate 2000 mw of electricity and provide irrigation to 0.27 million ha of land downstream. But critics of the project are determined to have it scrapped.
"Of what use will this be to the people here?" asks Chakradhar Tiwari, an environmental activist in Tehri. Tiwari has been agitating for community-owned micro-hydroelectric schemes in the Himalaya, saying smaller power plants are more suitable for the hills. But the real bombshell for environmentalists has been the sudden announcement that a large part of a 300 million rouble (IRs 20 billion) aid package to India agreed during the recent visit here by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would go to the Tehri project. More than half of the aid is said to be earmarked for Tehri, and observers are surprised that the Soviets had no qualms about backing a project that is caught in controversy and litigation. The Soviets were reportedly first interested in assisting India build another nuclear powerplant, but the Indian side didn´t want it, and Tehri was hurriedly taken up as an alternative.
Stiff opposition
Since its inception in 1977, the Tehri Dam project has met with stiff opposition from the 70,000 inhabitants of Tehri and 92 villages upstream. They have opposed plans to displace them and submerge 5000 ha of farmland, pastures and forests in the Bhagirathi valley 200 km north of Delhi. An "Anti-Tehri Dam Struggle Committee" has challenged the project -in the Indian supreme court on technical and ecological grounds. Hearings on the case are still going on. "We have a watertight case against the project. A government working group itself has concluded that the dam will be ecologically disastrous," says Virendra Saklani, an advocate who heads the committee.
The petition before the supreme court states that the dam site is risky because of the geomorphology of the Himalaya, where rock formations are weak and seismic activity is high. The petition also challenges the right of the state government to encroach on the fragile Himalayan ecosystem. The Botanical Survey of India has found that nearly 100 kinds of plants and herbs will be wiped out if the dam comes up. The reservoir´s life-span will also be reduced to 20 years because of the Bhagirathi´s high silt load.