Will damming rivers save drowning North India?

Flash floods in northern regions of India

In recent times, we have seen heavy flooding in India, resulting in loss of life, property and disruption in infrastructure. Nature’s fury in Uttarakhand in 2013 which led to the death of around 6000 people, has set out a clear case of impact of the imbalance in nature created by man. Taming of rivers, construction of dams, buildings, reclamation of the flood plains added to the environmental disaster in Uttarakhand. After a disaster of this magnitude, steps should have been taken to put in measures to regain the environmental balance. However, the Himachal floods in 2023, yet again showed that efforts to work in tune with nature were lacking. Taming rivers through the construction of dams for irrigation or hydroelectricity is not new -? however, increasing incidents of extreme weather and floods show that interfering with fragile landscapes may come at heavy cost to the ecology.?

Other environmental disasters in the Himalayan range like the 2022 floods in Pakistan submerged 2/3rds of the country, resulting? in the displacement of? millions and causing 14.9 billion dollars in damages and 15.2 billion in economic losses. These floods were a result of several factors including heavy monsoon, steep terrain, glacial melt, but added stressors like the diversion of the river Indus for irrigation, increasing encroachments, and depleting water storage capacity of the floodplains were human interventions exacerbating the disaster.?

A similar pattern is also emerging in Arunachal Pradesh, which has had its own share of environmental disasters recently. While dam projects have been proposed since the time of independence, in 2005, the Arunachal Pradesh Government allowed private companies to build dams on the tributaries of river Brahmaputra. This has led to landslides and rampant degradation of the hilly regions which are prone to flash floods.?

The proposed hydropower projects will require diversion of more forest land and the felling of trees, and a drastic change in the landscape of Arunachal Pradesh which is at high risk of earthquakes and lies under seismic zone II and III. Moreover, environment protection laws are being further amended regressively - they will not require public participation, and in some cases not even an environment clearance if they are declared as a “strategic” project under the Environment Impact Assessment. While local people have resisted and opposed these projects for decades, the state has been extremely aggressive towards people as there have been police shootings and arrests of people protesting the dams. Movements like Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti, All Assam Students Union and Asom Jatiyabadi Yuba Chtra Parishad, Siang Peoples Forum and several other groups have been working on building awareness around ecological and socio-economic impact of these dams on the local population.?