Brahmaputra Dams Promise Prosperity But at a Big Cost

Courtesy of Brian Orland The Siang River near the proposed site of the Lower Siang Hydroelectric Project in Arunachal Pradesh, in this Jan. 27, 2013 photo.

ROTTUNG, Arunachal Pradeshâ€"I’m standing, weak-kneed, midway across the gorge of the Siang River, one of the three tributaries that converge to form the Brahmaputra River. Treading slowly over a bamboo suspension footbridge 300-odd meters long and just a meter wide, I marvel at this premodern engineering by the Adi Minyong tribe that dominates this section of Arunachal Pradesh.

Nearly 100 meters below, the cool waters of the Siang course past. In the plains o Assam, barely 60 kilometers downstream, the Siang will join two other tributaries to make up the broad, muddy east-west flow of the Brahmaputra. But up here, the water of the Siang is a striking teal blue, reflecting the silt it has picked up in its 1,700-kilometer west-to-east dash from the glaciers of Mount Kailash in Tibet to the steaming jungles of northeast India.

In between these two legs of the stream course, the Siang and other tributaries romp north-to-south through steep cut gorges and pick up enormous hydraulic force along the way. This is the outlet of the fabled “great bend” of the Brahmaputra, whose biodiverse forests and precipitous mountains have enticed and challenged explorers for generations. According to legend, the Lost Horizon of Shangri-La awaits any favored adventurer who can make it all the way up to the top of the “great bend” in eastern Tibet.

The silt and incredible force of the tributary flows periodically wreak havoc on ! the plains below. Climate change and burgeoning populations only increase the disaster potential and the urgency of flood adaptation measures. Yet the same flow offers tempting potential for clean power generation to regions and countries desperately starved for energy.

China is already building a 510-megawatt dam upstream and has plans to construct three more of similar size. Not to be outdone, India has invited a private developer to build a 2,700-megawatt dam near the bamboo bridge on which I’m standing. This is just one of over 100 large dams India intends to build in Arunachal Pradesh to exploit a potential generating capacity of over 50,000 megawatts.

Courtesy of Brian Orland A farmer of the Adi Minyong tribe in Arunachal Pradesh returning to her village across the Siang River.

A high cheek-boned Adi beauty â€" a figure straight out of Shangri-La â€" jogs past me carrying 20 kilograms of ginger in a woven basket on her back. Depending on how it’s executed, the proposed dam can change her life for the better, securing reliable electricity for her upland village and providing much needed jobs for her tribe. By bringing in paved roadways, it will smooth the marketing channels for her produce and improve her price-setting leverage.

But in other ways the dam could also spell doom for her Shangri-La enclave. Road building could hasten the erosion of fragile slopes; construction and maintenance of the dam could introduce alien populations and communal tensions; ! a more mo! netized economy could undermine tribal values. And, most hazardous of all, upland storage of such massive heads of water behind concrete dams astride volatile earthquake zones invite instant annihilation of this earthly paradise. It’s not a matter of if, but when.

I have come here to Assam’s periphery to survey the Brahmaputra’s headwaters and sound out locals like this young Adi lady about the environmental changes in store for the region. Some members of tribal communities, like Jibi Pulu of the Idu-Mishmi, are already mourning landscapes that have become unrecognizable. But most people I talked with here in Arunachal were more focused on the future than the past. They were eager to speculate about dams on major tributaries of the Brahmaputra.

The projects have been long in coming, mooted as far back as the 1950s. But in those days, they were primariy championed for flood control. Now that India is breaking ground on them, the new crop of dams, although billed as “multipurpose,” are being financed by both public and private energy developers. With an eye on profits, these promoters naturally aim to maximize power production, rather than flood protection.

The two goals are potentially at odds. To generate more power, developers want to maintain as high a head of water as possible. But for flood control, the ideal is to leave plenty of empty space behind a dam to accommodate unexpected surges. Otherwise the only way to cope with a flash flood would be a sudden, catastrophic release of the massive lake already stored.

In dim houses around smoking open-pit fires, people in these mountain regions ponder the implications of such large-scale projects. “We’re not sure how the dam will affect our environment,” Mite Linggi, a dentist who is an activist in the Dibang Valley, confessed as he fanned the vapors away from his eyes and up ! into the ! drying rack above, the better to smoke-cure such local delicacies as carbonized fish, pork and squirrels. “Adequate study has not been done.”

Still, despite his personal doubts about the dam, he felt obliged, as an educated local leader, to petition the state government not for a halt to the project but rather for a richer cut of the proceeds â€" a 5 percent stake for his Idu-Mishmi community. Not that anything has come of his plea; it has languished for a year without reply.

Facing a future with neither environmental security nor fair remuneration, Mr. Linggi lamented, “We are in a corner now, with no place to go.”

Others, particularly younger members of the tribal communities, see the prospective dams as offering a promising future in an area of chronic underdevelopment. One sharp Adi 17-year-old who lives in the Siang Valley, after hearing out a night of pro-and-contra wrangling among his elders, simply shrugged. “At least the dam might give me a job,” he said.

Ironicaly, it’s on these very dams that India pins much of its hope for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change. Currently, thermal power plants are rapidly burning through the country’s vast but declining reserves of low-grade coal. In the process, they belch obscene amounts of heat-inducing gases into the atmosphere, altering the monsoon cycle and hastening glacier melt.

The antidote, India’s technocrats are convinced, is to tap enough renewable energy sources to satisfy 15 percent of the country’s overall energy demand by 2020. Dams on the Brahmaputra tributaries are critical to achieving this goal.

So here in the Brahmaputra River system, planners face a Hobson’s choice between the twin goals of climate change adaptation and mitigation. On the one hand, climate change-driven hydrological changes are catastrophically altering the landscape. Yet, on the other hand, the proposed “fix” of greenhouse-gas reducing alternative energy projects could itself wreak! havoc on! the ecosystem.

Brian Orland’s dispatches will appear regularly in India Ink. Last month, he wrote about the volatility of the Brahmaputra.