Uttarakhand floods: Why damning the dams is Himalayan blunder

By: Avdhash Kaushal


After the Uttarakhand disaster, every NGO activist worth his or her jhola has got 10 minutes of fame on TV channels. And they seem happy blaming local people and development work including hydel power projects for the catastrophic floods.

The truth is that there is a cost to be paid for building hydro power projects, and there is cost to be paid for not having them. It was only due to the Tehri dam that the recent Kumbh in Allahabad was made possible. It is clear now that the Tehri dam, by holding excess flow last week, actually saved Rishikesh and Haridwar. Then there is the larger question of livelihoods.

Being a hill state, Uttarakhand is ecologically sensitive but its two main sources of income are tourism and hydel energy. The state can look away from these two sources provided the rest of India decides to pick up the cost to keep this hill state in its pristine glory.

If they are true to their posturing, these NGO jholawallahs should not use electricity from hydel power stations because they are dangerous for the “fragile” ecology. Nuclear power runs the risk of Fukushima type of colossal tragedy; coal power stations are dirty and the dust from thermal station washeries contains nuclear radiation hazards.

Wind mills and the noise associated with them are harmful for ornithology; solar panels need an army of cleaners who have to toil in hot sun to constantly keep them clean — and photovoltaic cells involve use of toxic chemicals in their production. Therefore, the jholawallahs should be banned from using known sources of production of primary electricity.

They should not use secondary batteries also since they contain lead, lithium, metal hydrides and heavy metals that are likely to cause poisoning and cancer. Environmentalism is the new religion and even the sadhus and shankaracharyas, leaving dharma, have become environmentalists, and these NGO jholawallahs, sadhus and shankaracharyas use electricity from hydel power plants and claim that hydel energy is very harmful.

They even blame the new roads that have come up in the state for the floods, comfortably ignoring the fact that around 40% of villages in Uttarakhand do not have kutcharoad connectivity even today. Of course, one agrees that for the construction of roads, blasting of mountains should be minimised. People who are opposing the hydel power projects are propagating unscientific arguments that the Pala Maneri, Lohari Nagpala and Bhairon Ghati hydro power projects are based on run of river and river water is diverted into the tunnels.

And that to make these tunnels, the mountains were blasted. But the fact remains that the tunnels are not made by blasting the mountains but by the same drilling technique used in making tunnels for metro trains in big cities like Delhi and Kolkata. No house or building made on top of the metro tunnels is unsafe or is damaged.

Another argument that falls by the wayside is that the floods were a result of destruction of forests. Uttarakhand is one of the few states in India that boasts of 65% of forest covered area and that is the reason why it gets abundant rainfall. In the last few years, engineering colleges, IITs, technical institutes and universities have come up in the state that help provide much-needed employment, besides imparting skills to the unemployed youth of the state.

In this colossal calamity, people of Uttarakhand have lost their fields, houses, shops and animals, and they are the ones who will reel under the post-trauma effects, unlike the pilgrims who were saved and ferried back to their hometowns elsewhere in the country.

The rural people who stayed hungry and fed the tourists are being slandered in the media by vested interests. In fact, they remain the greatest sufferers despite sacrificing everything for the sake of environment and the area. They have no available land for making a house of their own, a reason why many of them opt to reside close to the riverbeds.

(The writer, a Padma awardee, is chairperson, Rural Litigation & Entitlement Kendra)