India's water security crisis: Dams, pollution and climate change biggest threats facing Himalayan rivers

For most pilgrims on their way to Kedarnath, Srinagar in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand is just a town they might stop at for a cup of tea or a snack. Almost equidistant from Haridwar and Kedarnath, there is nothing that marks it out.

However, all you need to do is stop your car just outside Srinagar before you enter it from Haridwar, near the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) training academy, step off the road and take a few steps toward the Alaknanda river. Almost immediately, the scars of the floods in Uttarakhand would be visible to everyone, over two years after the disaster.

The SSB auditorium, damaged then, still stands askew with its dome — a not so insignificant reminder of the havoc the river wrought between June 15 and 18 in 2013. As if that were not enough, what used to be a park till June 14 now has mounds of muck the river brought from upstream, which from a distance gives one the feeling of impending construction activity. Vijaylaxmi Raturi, a lawyer who stays across the road, says most of the muck is debris from GVK Power & Infrastructure’s 330 MW hydel power project a few kilometres upstream, which was under construction then. “It had rained as heavily before as well but there was never any muck,” says Raturi. The Alaknanda meets the Bhagirathi downstream at Devprayag to form the Ganga.

In a 2014 report by a committee set up by the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF), which said hydel projects in Uttarakhand — home to the controversial Tehri dam — aggravated the June 2013 disaster, there were conflicting views on the impact of the Srinagar project.

According to environmental activists and scientists, dams along with pollution and climate change are among the biggest threats facing Himalayan rivers like the Brahmaputra, the Indus and the Ganga. These have a direct bearing on India’s water security because Himalayan rivers account for nearly two-thirds of India’s national river flows, and 43 per cent of India’s population depends on just the Ganga for their water needs.

India has 4,857 large dams (more than 15 m in height or 10-15 m if it fulfills some other conditions) in operation and 314 under construction. While nine out of 10 dams in India have irrigation as their main purpose, in the Himalayan region, which accounts for 70 per cent of hydel power potential, India, China, Nepal and Bhutan are in a race to build dams for hydro power.



Dams are increasingly becoming a source of geopolitical tension between countries, especially India and China over the Brahmaputra, which originates in Tibet. According to an article in Science magazine, India also has plans for 292 dams in the Himalayas to double hydel power by 2030 and that region could have one of the highest dam densities in the world.

Large hydro power projects (more than 25 MW) account for 15 per cent of India’s installed power capacity of 2,72,503 MW, but it has identified hydel capacity to be developed which is two-and-a-half times the existing hydel capacity, the highest of which is in Arunachal Pradesh, followed by Uttarakhand, Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Sikkim.

The GVK project, which changed hands a few times since the 1980s before being acquired by the company in 2005, has faced opposition from the locals (it was commissioned in March).

Bharat Jhunjhunwala, an activist and a former professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru, contested in the High Court of Uttarakhand in Nainital in 2009 that the original capacity approved for the project was only 200 MW and that the environmental clearance given had lapsed. The case then went to the Supreme Court which in 2013 gave a goahead to the project.

Projects & Their Impact

Locals say that ever since the project started operating, there has been severe water scarcity. A GVK spokesperson says since it is a run-of-the-river project, “the flow in the river after the powerhouse is the same as the inflows before the dam”.

He adds that to meet the water requirements of the stretch between the dam and the powerhouse, there are minimum environmental flows of 5 cubic metres per second, which includes public water supply requirements, as approved by the MoEF. Environmental flows, which refer to the quantity, quality and timing of water flows required for a river to perform its ecological functions, has gained credence.

In the Indian context, given rivers’ religious significance some people have even added the socio-cultural dimension to environmental flows.

Ashok Khurana, director general of Association of Power Producers, says there should be an objective scientific assessment of hydro projects in the Himalayas. “No one wants to defile the environment. Every project will have an impact, but there are mitigating measures. We first need to find out how much hydel power can be developed in a sustainable manner in the Himalayas,” he adds.



While those critical of large dams in India cite the US’ policy to decommission some large dams, Kameswara Rao, partner, energy and utilities, PricewaterhouseCoopers, believes there is more to it: “Canada has continued to invest in hydel [power] and the US imports hydro power from Canada, and European countries like Norway, Sweden and Switzerland continue to depend on hydro power.”

One of the proposed ways to regulate development along the rivers is cumulative impact assessment which, in case of a hydel project, does not look only at the impact of that project which is what environment impact assessment (EIA) does, but also the impact on the river of all the other hydel projects and other developmental activities like roads and irrigation projects in the region, the people living there and the biodiversity. “We need a river basin approach to rivers, similar to the landscape approach we have for forest and wildlife conservation,” says VB Mathur, director of Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India.

Jhunjhunwala, who fought an unsuccessful legal battle against the Srinagar project, says while he is not opposed to hydel power, a part of the river should be allowed to flow uninterrupted at all times, unlike now when sometimes the entire flow of the river is halted. Adds Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, “We have accepted we need to save tigers, but we have no law to save rivers. India’s long-pending plan to link 37 rivers has been criticised on the grounds that it could do irreversible damage to rivers.”

Saving India’s rivers, particularly the Ganga, is one of prime minister Narendra Modi’s pet projects. The Narendra Modi government has even carved out a separate ministry for river development and the Ganga rejuvenation. In 2009, the Ganga National River Basin Authority was reconstituted and the river was made the national river and the government has so far spent `4,000 crore on cleaning the Ganga, not to much avail.

The newest moniker for the government’s efforts is ‘Namami Gange’ under which the Centre has set aside `20,000 crore over five years. About 6,100 million litres per day (MLD) of sewage is discharged into the Ganga every day, with sewage treatment capacity only a fifth of that. The National Green Tribunal earlier this week banned the use of plastic bags in Haridwar, which is on the banks of the Ganga, and imposed a fine of `5,000 per violation.

Others in Trouble too

The Yamuna, which is a tributary of the Ganga, is in no better shape, with a sewage discharge of 3,445 MLD in the first 10 months of 2014. The government has spent over `1,500 crore to clean up the river. While India’s per capita water availability is expected to drop from around 1,500 cubic metres to 1,240 cubic metres in 2030, the actual figure could be much lower if the quality of the water available is taken into account.

While most people ET Magazine spoke to were quite skeptical of what the government can achieve, some are hopeful.

“If the Ganga, with all its complexities, can be cleaned up till Kanpur, any river can be cleaned up. We welcome the political attention on the initiative, and the PM’s personal attention,” says Suresh Babu, director, water policy, World Wildlife Fund-India.

A threat which is not as well understood as dams and pollution is that of climate change. While the impact of climate change on the Himalayas and the rivers there is yet to be extensively studied, it is clear that the period of rainfall is going to get shorter but the intensity of rains is going to increase, leading to flooding. On the other hand, during the non-monsoon months, the water availability might go down eventually after seeing a spurt.

Snow and glacier melt account for 29 per cent of the annual flow of the Ganges at Devprayag, and in summer, the figure goes up to 70 per cent. With the glaciers and snow melting at a faster clip thanks to the rise in temperature, there will be an initial rise in the flow in rivers, but in the long term the flow will reduce. According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report, the Himalayan glaciers would shrink by 45 per cent by 2100 if the average surface temperature of the earth rose by 1.8 degree celsius.

In case the temperature rose by 3.7 degree celsius, the shrinkage would be 68 per cent.

People’s Science Institute’s Ravi Chopra, who headed the MoEF committee on the 2013 disaster, says since glacier melt accounts for less than a third of the Ganga’s annual flow at Devprayag, base flows, which are from the seepage of groundwater, contribute the rest and we need to ensure that continues: “In the last few decades, more and more of springs and underground seepages have disappeared throughout the mountains. One primary reason is the loss of forests.”

With the increase in India’s population, India’s water security is certainly not getting any less precarious. This combined with the fact that Himalayan rivers are central to ecosystems the loss of which cannot be reversed should get us to act with alacrity.