Hydropower, mega dams,and the politics of riskSANJIB BARUAH

IDENTITY politics in western capitalistdemocracies is said to have been associatedwith the advent of post-materialist values –a shift of priorities from matters oflivelihood and security to ‘belonging, self-expression, and the quality of life.’1 But inthe rest of the world identity politics hasnot been about that. Material concerns havebeen central to Northeast India’s identitypolitics. Even those who are militant abouttheir independentist political agendas are noradicals when it comes to lifestyle choices:many are unabashed about embracing theaccoutrements of modern consumer society.

Development as an ideology – i.e.,developmentalism – evokes ‘much more than

just a socio-economic endeavour; it is aperception which models reality, a myth whichcomforts societies, and a fantasy whichunleashes passions.’2 There is surely anelement of fantasy in former Mizoram ChiefMinister Zoramthanga’s promise that a newWorld Bank financed road would be ‘smooth andsleek like a snake.’3 A policy document of theArunachal Pradesh Government has a similarnote of fantasy when it proclaims that thestate could be ‘floating’ on ‘hydro-dollars’,as oil-producing Middle Eastern countriespresumably do on ‘petro-dollars’.4 

Arguably, developmentalism has been theshared ideology of Indian nationalists,regionalists and identity activists alike:they all desire ‘development’. Some identityactivists may emphasize the unevenness ofdevelopment as a process and argue thatNortheast India’s natural resources areexploited to benefit the wealthier parts ofthe country. Others may accuse regionalpolitical elites of ignoring thedevelopmental needs of poorer sub-regions.Yet, identity politics in Northeast India hasbeen mostly about getting a better deal: to‘close the development gap’ or to ‘catch up’with more ‘developed’ areas. There are no

obvious tensions between the politics ofrecognition and the politics ofredistribution: the two have coexisted quitecomfortably. But this political paradigm thatfuses identity politics with the ideology ofdevelopment is under strain today.

Developmentalism has had such a hold on theimagination of Northeast India’s politicalclasses that even in activist circles, withrare exceptions, there isn’t much criticalthinking on the subject. Ideas such asAmartya Sen’s, that development is about‘expanding real freedoms’5 – and theimplication that without proper vigilancedevelopment projects may promote freedom forsome and un-freedom for others – have hadvery little impact. Phrases like humandevelopment and sustainable development havemade their way into the public discourse. Butthere is little evidence that they have hadan impact on the way most people think aboutdevelopment.

 

The Assam Accord of 1985 is a remarkableillustration of the complicity of identitypolitics with developmentalism. The agreementended the six-year old Assam Movement driven

by the fear that the identities of theregion’s ‘indigenous’ peoples were underthreat. Since the violence in western Assamin the summer of 2012, the Assam Accord’sfailure to do much about ‘illegalimmigration’ – the cause célèbre of the AssamMovement – has come up for scrutiny. But theAssam Accord also committed the Indiangovernment to providing ‘constitutional,legislative and administrative safeguards… toprotect, preserve and promote the culture,social, linguistic identity and heritage ofthe Assamese people’ and to ‘the speedy allround economic development of Assam, so as toimprove the standard of living of thepeople.’

To give effect to these commitments, theIndian government subsequently funded anumber of major projects in Assam, includingthe Numaligarh refinery, the Bogibeel bridgeon the Brahmaputra River, and of all things,the Assam Gas Cracker Project, apart fromcultural and educational institutions such asthe Sankardev Kalakshetra cultural complex,and the Indian Institute of Technology inGuwahati, and two central universities.

Historically, the shared ideology ofdevelopment had made ethno-national

discontent in Northeast India politicallymore manageable. It enabled the appeasementof leaders of identity movements – includingmilitant ones – and the cooptation of theirplatforms. The ‘magnitude of popularawareness and interest in development’ inAssam is ‘a rare social force’, says acommittee of the Indian Planning Commission.If used ‘constructively… it can be the mostprecious capital for the development ofAssam.’6 It is perhaps not surprising that ata time when global manufacturing wasbeginning to move aggressively to areas thatwere once called the ‘third world’, the logicof capital and the ideology of developmentwould converge so neatly.

 

According to a 2007 report, India’s powerdemand is expected to rise by 350 per cent inthe next two decades.7 That would require thecountry to triple its power generationcapacity.8 Hydropower has a significant placein India’s energy strategy. Much of India’suntapped hydropower potential is in the fast-moving rivers of the Eastern Himalayas. Thishas been known for a while. But tillrecently, the massive engineering projects

necessary to tap into those reserves were notconsidered feasible because of NortheastIndia’s poor communication infrastructure.That situation has now changed, partlybecause of the success of development-oriented protest movements in Assam. Over theyears, they led to significant governmentinvestments in the region’s communicationinfrastructure – improved roads and railwaystracks, as well as bridges, especially on theBrahmaputra, that were at one time or anotherthe explicit demand of Assamese protests.

 

According to the estimates of the CentralElectricity Authority, Northeast India couldgenerate as much as 58,971 megawatts ofhydropower. Arunachal Pradesh alone has thehydropower potential of about 50,328megawatts – the highest in the country.9

Developing the infrastructure to tap intothose reserves has now become a majorpriority. As of October 2010, there were 132memoranda of understanding signed between theGovernment of Arunachal Pradesh and potentialdevelopers of hydropower projects with atotal capacity of 40,140.5 mw. 120 of thosememoranda are with private companies.10 A news

report of September 2011 puts the number ofmemoranda of understanding signed at 148.11

According to one estimate, in a ten-yearperiod, Arunachal Pradesh proposes to addhydro-power capacity which ‘is only a littleless than the total hydropower capacity addedin the whole country in 60 years ofindependence.’12 But while the state ofArunachal Pradesh expects to make windfallgains from hydropower, there is growinganxiety about the downstream impact of largedams in the plains of Assam.

Northeast India is a seismically activeregion where earthquakes impact thehydrologic characteristics and morphology ofrivers and water bodies.13 Such changes occurin this region not just in the vastness ofgeological time, but in the time-scale ofordinary humans. Historical sources arereplete with references to earthquakes –including catastrophic ones. Thus followingthe 8.7 earthquake of 1950, massivelandslides had blocked the downstream flow ofthe Dihing, Dibang and Subansiri rivers. Whenthe trapped water burst through in cascades afew days later, it caused catastrophic floodsdownstream. These are among the rivers onwhich major hydropower dams are being built

or planned today. The earthquake and thefloods of 1950 are deeply etched in thecollective memory of the people of theBrahmaputra Valley and large dams evoke a rawsense of danger and foreboding.

 

Moreover, Northeast India’s own energy needsare quite modest. The per capita energy useis a third of India’s national average, andthe industrial use of energy is less than oneper cent of India’s total. Fewer villageshave access to electricity compared to therest of the country. Yet the hydropower thatthe new projects will produce is meant almostentirely for use elsewhere. Project designdocuments include a section on ‘powerevacuation’: the transmission arrangementsthat would take electricity from powergeneration facilities to the national powergrid.

The primary implication for Northeast Indiaseems quite clear: the region is entering theera of late capitalism in a familiar role –as supplier of a key natural resource to fuelthe engines of economic dynamism elsewhere.But the people of the region will have tobear a disproportionate burden of the costs

and the risks of large dams in the Himalayanrivers. Fundamental ambivalence about therisks and the distribution of risks hasshaken the people’s faith in development.Suddenly, solidarity from anxiety has becomea potent social force.

 

The economics of hydropower is quite simple:the fuel for hydropower production is movingwater; and if society chooses to defineproperty rights in a particular way, theowners of hydropower plants get the basicfuel almost free of cost. Given the ‘free’source of fuel, unlike thermal power plantsusing coal, oil or natural gas, hydropowerplants require huge initial investments, butonce they are built, the operational costsare minimal. Hydropower is attractive alsobecause of assured security of supply forcountries that depend on foreign sources forfossil fuels. But even though hydro-power maybe attractive to environmentalists because itis a low-carbon source of energy, hydropowerdevelopment, especially when it is large-scale, reeks of unsustainability.

Most large hydropower dams in ArunachalPradesh – under construction, or currently on

the drawing board – are sure to destroy thehealth of rivers and their ecosystems, withpotentially devastating consequences for thelivelihood of communities that depend on themand on the aquatic and terrestrial habitatsof numerous plant and wildlife species. Thepotential negative effects will be especiallywidespread in Northeast India becausemillions of people rely on the water commonsfor their livelihood. They fish in therivers, streams and other water-bodies andfish is central to the people’s diet, and amajor source of the caloric intake of poorpeople. Flood-recession agriculture in theflood plains depends crucially on thenutrients from sediments that the riversbring.

 

There is a fundamental difference betweenthe hydropower projects being currently builtor planned in Northeast India and an earliergeneration of multipurpose river valleyprojects. In the mid-20th century, the spiritof decolonization itself drove multi-purposeriver valley projects. The ‘development ofrivers’, in Rohan D’Souza’s words, had‘charged decolonizing nations with a new

technological mission: the giant quest totransform fluvial powers into national assets– hydroelectricity, navigation, irrigation,and flood control.’14 The model behind thoseprojects was to use resources generated byhydropower to finance public goods such asflood mitigation, irrigation and navigationas part of a comprehensive strategy todevelop a river basin region. Indeed, tillrecently, the focus of all policy thinkingabout rivers in Assam was flood control.

The Government of India had constituted theBrahmaputra Board in 1972 with flood controlas its primary mandate. Previousinvestigations on dams on rivers of theBrahmaputra river basin under the auspices ofauthorities such as the Brahmaputra FloodControl Commission and the Brahmaputra Boardwere all for multipurpose projects. But noneof these plans got off the ground because ofresource constraints. Those plans have nowall been abandoned in favour of single-purpose hydropower dams with power to beproduced and sold for a profit by private aswell as public sector companies.15 

The 2000 megawatts Lower Subansiri HydroElectric Project – India’s biggest so far –is the first among the very large hydropower

projects to get to the construction phase.The 116 m high concrete gravity dam underconstruction is located in 2.3 km upstream ofGerukamukh village in the Dhemaji district ofAssam. Protests against the project startedas soon as the process of granting clearancesunder India’s environment, forest andwildlife laws began in the early 2000s.Initially, it was primarily environmentalactivists who had voiced opposition ongrounds that the dam site and submergencearea includes a region known for its richwildlife and biodiversity. They pointed outserious flaws in the Environmental ImpactAssessment and other project documentssubmitted for obtaining clearances, arguingthat they underestimated the project’spotential adverse impact on biodiversity.They raised procedural objections as well.

 

But the protests gained strength whenconstruction began in earnest in 2005, andtwo influential organizations, the All AssamStudents Union (AASU) and the Krishak MuktiSangram Samiti (KMSS) – led by Akhil Gogoi,who had developed a nation-wide reputation asa right to information activist – got

involved. Soon the state’s main oppositionparty, Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) also joinedin. The protests were focused on the issue ofdam safety, and on the potential adverseimpact on downstream communities.

The uneven distribution of the costs andvulnerability of the project has also becomea major area of contention. As the anti-damagitation gained strength, and the April 2011elections to the state assembly drew near,the Lower Subansiri dam emerged as a majorpolitical issue in Assam. In July 2009, thestate legislative assembly debated the issueand members of the ruling Congress partyjoined opposition MLAs in expressing concernabout the dam’s potential adverse impact ondownstream communities.

 

A critical step in the controversy was theconstitution of an expert group to study thedownstream impact of the dam. It was theresult of an agreement in December 2006between the Assam state government, thepublic sector company building the LowerSubansiri dam, the National HydroelectricPower Corporation or NHPC, and AASU, which bythen was playing a major role in the

protests. The expert group was constitutedwith eight academics – professors of civilengineering, environmental science,geography, geology, life sciences and zoologyat three of Assam’s most prestigious academicinstitutions: Gauhati University, DibrugarhUniversity and the Indian Institute ofTechnology in Guwahati. The NHPC laterindicated that it was a reluctant party tothe agreement. It ‘was constrained to awardthe study’ to this group of academics, saysan NHPC statement, and that the compositionof the committee was ‘suggested by AASU.’16 

The expert group submitted its report in June2010. It confirmed that the fears expressedabout the dam’s safety and adverse impact ondownstream communities were not unreasonable.The report recommended that the dam beredesigned: its height reduced and otherchanges made to increase the river flow andhelp flood moderation, but changes that wouldcut into its power producing capacity andprofitability. The expert group’s report,coming as it did months before the 2011elections, galvanized the protests in Assam.In the autumn of 2010, the political stakeswere high enough for the then environmentminister, Jairam Ramesh to come to Guwahati

and hold a ‘public consultation’ on the issueof large dams. In keeping with an assurancehe gave to that audience, Ramesh wrote aletter to the prime minister conveying thesentiments expressed in that meeting. On theLower Subansiri project, he said ‘thedominant view in Assam appears to be thatthis project will have serious downstreamimpacts’ and that they want the ‘project tobe scrapped completely.’ He also made note of‘the feeling in vocal sections of Assam’ssociety’ that ‘"mainland India" is exploitingthe North East hydel resources for itsbenefits, while the cost of this exploitationwill be borne by the people of North East.’17 

 

Right from the beginning of the controversy,vernacular knowledge based on experience hadpresented a challenge to expert knowledge.But the expert group’s report added a newdimension to the controversy: there was now acontest over the authority of two rivalbodies of expert knowledge. The NHPC’sresponse to the expert group’s reportasserted that ‘the geological andseismological’ aspects of the project wereall ‘thoroughly examined by specialists’

during the approval process. Top specialistsof government agencies such as the CentralWater Commission, the Geological Survey ofIndia, Central Soil and Materials ResearchStation, and the Central ElectricityAuthority were involved in the process.

The dam’s location, said the NHPC, wascleared by the Indian government’s ‘highestauthorities’. The seismic parameters of thedesign were approved by the NationalCommittee on Seismic Design Parameters ofRiver Valley Projects – ‘the highest levelcommittee’ of the Indian government based on‘site-specific seismic design parameterstudies’ done by experts at the Department ofEarthquake Engineering of the IndianInstitute of Technology in Rourkee – ‘one ofthe renowned institutes which hasspecialization in this field.’18 

 

In January 2012, a paid advertisement byNHPC appeared in many newspapers in Assamunder the heading ‘Clearing the Myths byPresenting Facts on Subansiri Lower HydroPower Project.’ The advertisement juxtaposeda number of ‘myths’ against ‘facts’. Ratherarrogantly, the arguments made in the expert

group’s report, with the words often liftedfrom the report itself, were presented as‘myths’. The first ‘myth’ listed was theexpert group’s argument that the site of thedam was inappropriate. The so-called ‘fact’was as follows: ‘The siting of the dam at thepresent location has been cleared by thedesignated authorities of Govt. of India,after satisfying themselves with the existinggeological, seismological and tectonic set-upat the site and adequacy of investigations.’Against the ‘myth’ that ‘the dam may break’was another ‘fact’: ‘NHPC has so farconstructed 12 dams in different parts of theHimalayas, all of which are performingsatisfactorily. In 36 years of NHPC history,there is no case of distress on any dam.’19 

Whatever the prestige of the technicalexperts in India’s top-level officialagencies, their stamp of approval has failedto carry the day with public opinion inAssam. The expert group that includedgeologists and civil engineers who teach insome of the region’s best academicinstitutions has much more credibility inAssam. As a group they are seen as havingmore stakes in the safety of those dams thananyone living in Delhi or Rourkee. The debate

has turned into an instance of, what Dutchsocial theorist Annemarie Mol callsontological politics.20 The impasse is areminder of sociologist Ulrich Beck’sargument that experts can only presume the‘cultural acceptance’ of risks; they cannotproduce that acceptance. The people of theBrahmaputra Valley seem to believe that theyintuitively understand that there may beunintended risks to these large dams that areincalculable and uninsurable.21 To asignificant degree, that feeling seems to beshared by experts and laymen alike.

 

The debate has now entered a disturbing newphase. There is growing talk of Maoists‘infiltrating’ the protests against largedams. Assam’s Chief Minister Tarun Gogoicites ‘Intelligence inputs and Home Ministryreports’ to support his claim.22 An internalmemo of the Ministry of Home Affairs warns ofa ‘new "Red Terror Corridor" along the Assam-Arunachal border’,23 a geographical belt thatincludes the construction site of the LowerSubansiri project which has been the focus ofanti-dam protests. In May 2012, securityforces arrested many protesters and forcibly

removed barricades and other impedimentsblocking the transportation of constructionmaterial to the dam site.

 

It has been said of China that rule by an‘unconstrained technocracy’ has not beenconducive to ‘good ideas or decisions’ inmatters such as the Three Gorges dam, theSARS epidemic or the high-speed rail network.At one time, the Chinese Politburo’s nine-member Standing Committee had as many aseight professional engineers.24 Democraciesshould be able to better engage the public inmatters of ontological politics. The memoriesof devastating earthquakes, the livedexperience of frequent floods, and theknowledge of the region’s own scientists,technologists and intellectuals have broughttogether a remarkably well-informed regionalpublic around the issue of large hydropowerdams in Assam.

One hopes that India’s democraticinstitutions will find a way of meaningfullyengaging that public instead of mobilizingthe coercive apparatus of the state againstprotesters. If a democracy has advantagesover an unconstrained technocracy in

delivering ‘development as freedom’ it isbecause at least in principle, it can makecritical agency – the freedom to act and thefreedom to question and reassess – ‘a greatally of development.’25

 

Footnotes:

1. Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society.Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 66.

2. W. Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide toKnowledge as Power. Zed Books, London, 1992, pp. 1-2.

3. Cited in Lipokmar Dzuvichu, ‘How Many Roads Must theState Build?’ Biblio, New Delhi, May-June, 2008, p. 30.

4. Government of Arunachal Pradesh, ‘Hydro ElectricPower Policy.’ http://www.arunachalhydro.org.in/pdf/State%20Mega% 20Hydro.pdf

5. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom. Oxford UniversityPress, Oxford, 1999.

6. Planning Commission, Report of the Committee onClause Seven of Assam Accord, April 1990, p. 1.

7. Some of the points made in the following sections ofthe essay are expanded in ‘Whose River is it Anyway?The Political Economy of Hydropower in the EasternHimalayas’, Economic and Political Weekly 47(29), 2012.

8. Development and Growth in Northeast India: TheNatural Resources, Water, and Environment Nexus –Strategy Report (Report No. 36397-IN, South Asia

Region). The World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2007, pp.55-56.

9. Mission 2012: Power for All, Powering India’sGrowth. Ministry of Power, Annual Report, 2003-2004.New Delhi, p. 37.http://www.powermin.nic.in/reports/pdf/ar03_04.pdf

10. Neeraj Vagholikar and Partha J. Das, ‘DammingNortheast India.’ Kalpavriksh, Aaranyak and ActionAidIndia, 2010.

11. ‘MoU Virus hits Arunachal Pradesh’, Down to Earth, 9September 2011.http://www.downtoearth.org.in/content/mou-virus-hits-arunachal-pradesh

12. Independent People’s Tribunal on Dams in ArunachalPradesh: Interim Report. Human Rights Law Network, NewDelhi, 2008, p. 3.

13. Dulal C. Goswami, ‘Managing the Wealth and Woes ofthe River Brahmaputra’, Ishani (Guwahati) 2(4), 2008.https://www.indianfolklore.org/journals/index.php/Ish/article/view/449/514

14. Rohan D’Souza, ‘Framing India’s Hydraulic Crisis:The Politics of the Modern Large Dam’, Monthly Review60(3), 2008.

15. Of the 147 hydropower projects for which theArunachal Pradesh government has signed memoranda ofagreement with developers only one is for a ‘multi-purpose’ project – the 3000 mw Dibang project isreferred to as ‘multi-purpose’ because it has a floodmoderation component. The rest are all single-purposehydropower projects.

16. National Hydroelectric Power Corporation,‘Counterpoint: The NHPC’s View Point’, in MrinalTalukdar and Kishor Kumar Kalita (eds.), Big Dams andAssam. Nanda Talukdar Foundation, Guwahati, p. 33.

17. Jairam Ramesh, Letter to the Prime Minister ofIndia, Reprinted in Big Dams and Assam, pp. 96-100.

18. ‘Face Off: The Expert Group versus NHPC’, in BigDams and Assam, pp. 52-53, op cit.

19. National Hydroelectric Power Corporation, ‘Clearingthe Myths by Presenting Facts on Subansiri Lower HydroPower Project,’ Advertisement, The Telegraph (Guwahati),21 January 2012.

20. Annemarie Mol, ‘Ontological Politics: A Word andSome Questions’, in John Law and John Hassard (eds.),Actor Network Theory and After. Blackwell, Oxford, 1999, pp.74-89.

21. Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society. Polity Press,Cambridge, 1999, pp. 58, 160n.

22. ‘Maoists formed body to oppose dams: CM,’ AssamTribune, 13 January 2012.

23. Cited in Ajai Sahni, ‘The Northeast: TroublingExternalities’, South Asia Intelligence Review, WeeklyAssessments and Briefings, volume 10, no. 38, 26 March2012. http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/sair/index.htm

24. ‘Technocrats: Minds like Machines’, The Economist(London), 19 November 2011.

25. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, India: Development and Participation. Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, p.274.