Tehri: Temple or Tomb?

´´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 oppositionSince 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..Massive boostGovernment sources refuse to comment on the allegations, saying the matter is for the supreme court to decide. Tehri´s massive boost to the North Indian power grid and irrigation potential, the government hopes, will catalyse greater agricultural productivity in the plains of the Ganges. The government also feels that nearly US $140 million have been spent on the project, and it is too late to stop it. Recent reports suggest that the project will be completed ahead of schedule with Soviet assistance..Critics charge that the government has chosen to disregard reservations expressed in the first project report. "The Tehri project is typical of lop-sided development. In wanting to generate creating a hostof problems in the hills," creating a host of problems in the hills", says H. L. Badola, editor of a regional weekly here. The government has decided to shift its power generation base from thermal plants to hydro-electricity, and since the mid-1970s, some 22 hydro-electric projects have been commissioned in the Himalaya. This policy has resulted in widespread resentment against large dam projects and has sent ripples as far away as the gigantic Narbada river valley project in central India. Local opposition is also building up against, another hydro-electric scheme in the scenic Valley of Flowers near the renowned Hindu pilgrimage spot at Badri Nath near here. The disastrous rehabilitation of people displaced by the Pong Dam in the neighbouring state of Himachal Pradesh appears to have harmed government credibility in Tehri. Only 12 out of 92 villages which will be submerged by Tehri´s 45 km long reservoir have been allocated land for rehabilitation. "The government can´t manufacture land. Where will the oustees go? wherever they are sent, forests will be destroyed," says Saklani.."The government has never paused to consider the long-term implications of its policies in the hills. First, the forests were commercialised and made into timber mines. Now, it´s OCT rivers," says´ Sunderlal Bahuguna – the well-known crusader for conservation in the Himalaya, and leader of the "Chipko" movement. Critics of large projects like Tehri claim that such projects will always be technically infeasible, and will needlessly displace people..Riin-of-the-riverThe Struggle Committee has suggested an alternative run-of-the-river scheme which may not generate as much electricity, but will be more permanent than the dam. It will also be of immediate benefit in the hills rather than cater to the plains, they say. Similar suggestions for multi-purpose community power plants on fast-flowing Himalayan streams have also been given to the authorities in Delhi by activists like Tiwari. But the. government is sceptical of the schemes.."Small may be beautiful, but how can a country as large as India create an industrial base? Nuclear energy is not safe, thermal plants pollute, now we´re being told hydro energy displaces people, which way do we go?" asks a government official not involved with the project. The controversy is not peculiar to India. Critics say planners, engineers, contractors and politicians always unite the world over on big projects where the stakes are high. Inaugurating the country´s first large hydro-electric project that led to the Green Revolution, India´s former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru once called large dams "temples of the modem age." Twenty years later, there are many here in Tehri who think large dams are not temples, but tombs..~ Rajiv Tiwari is a reporter for Inter Press Service in New Delhi.