Work on a major hydroelectric dam in the Himalayas has been stopped after one of India’s most eminent scientists came close to dying on the 38th day of a fast in protest against the harnessing of a tributary of the sacred river Ganges.
Professor AD Agarwal, 77, former dean of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi at Kanpur, last week called off his second fast in a year against Himalayan dam projects, after the Indian government agreed to speed up its inquiry into how electricity could be generated without the flow of the water being impeded. The free running of the river is a crucial element of its sacred status.
“The water ... is not ordinary water to a Hindu. It is a matter of the life and death of Hindu faith,” Agarwal said before his fast began in January.
The 600-megawatt Loharinag-Pala project is one of several hundred major dams and barrages planned or now being constructed by India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan in the foothills of the Himalayas. Together they are expected to provide 150,000MW of electric power for countries in which power cuts are frequent and demand is growing fast. But experts argue the dams will have profound effects on the environment and culture of the region, affecting the lives of millions of people.
According to a recent report from the NGO International Rivers, the dams will fundamentally transform the landscape, ecology and economy of the region and displace hundreds of thousands of people.
Shripad Dharmadhikary, one of south Asia’s leading water and energy experts, who wrote the report, said: “Damming and diversion of rivers [in the Himalayas] will severely disrupt downstream flows, impacting agriculture and fisheries and threatening livelihoods of entire populations.”
The NGO organized a global campaign against dams yesterday — designated International Day of Action for Rivers.
Dharmadhikary’s report said the dams were being planned and carried out with hardly any environmental assessment of individual or cumulative impacts.
“If all the planned capacity expansion materializes, the Himalayan region could have the highest concentration of dams in the world. The dams’ reservoirs, tunnels, transmission lines and related works will destroy thousands of houses, rivers, forests, spiritual sites and even parts of the highest highway in the world, the Karakoram highway,” it said.
In addition, it warned that climate change could reduce the amount of electricity the dams generate. This is because increased melting of glaciers is washing more silt down the mountains, reducing the capacity of the dams.
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