Sinking city casts shadow on hydro
India’s push to boost energy supplies blamed for a torrent of river mishaps, writes Roli Srivastava
Farmer Shiv Lal barely slept this week, overcome by worry about the deep cracks scarring his land and hundreds of other homes and buildings in a sinking town in India’s Himalayas.
On Jan 2 and 3, Mr Lal and other residents of Joshimath in northern Uttarakhand state woke to find large cracks running through their walls and floors. Outside, roads and walkways had caved in and cracked as the land beneath them shifted.
“I’ve moved my grandchildren and wife to the nearby school because our home isn’t safe,” Mr Lal told the Thomson Reuters Foundation as he stood outside the abandoned house on his plot, which he visits every day and longs to return to.
Like many others in the town, which lies more than 1,800 metres above sea level, he blames the damage on a hotel construction boom and tunneling for a nearby hydroelectric project being built by India’s state-run power utility NTPC.
“What have we gained from this NTPC project or tourism? I don’t know if I have eaten or slept in days,” he said.
India is striving to boost its hydropower production to help meet a target for overall clean energy capacity of 500 gigawatts (GW) by 2030. Hydropower currently accounts for about 13%, or 47 GW, of the country’s total power generation capacity.
While NTPC officials and some geologists have ruled out tunneling work as the cause of this month’s devastation in Joshimath, residents’ angry protests have reignited debate about the construction of hydropower projects in Himalayan areas.
Uttarakhand, which is prone to flash floods and landslides, has more than 10 operational hydropower projects, with another 75 being built — among them NTPC’s Tapovan-Vishnugad plant — officials at the state’s renewable energy department said.
Environmentalists say Joshimath’s woes should prompt a rethink about building more new plants in mountain areas.
“Ninety percent of this problem is because of hydropower projects. The tunnel-making process has created havoc,” said Anjal Prakash, research director of the Bharati Institute of Public Policy at the Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business.
“India must rethink and hydropower projects in the Himalayan region should be stopped,” said Prakash, who is also an author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports in 2019 and 2022.
Experts have warned for years that large-scale construction work, including hydropower projects, in and around Joshimath could lead to land subsidence — the sinking or settling of the ground surface.
Piyoosh Rautela, executive director of Uttarakhand Disaster Mitigation and management, said this month’s incident was likely to have been caused by an aquifer that had breached, adding that the reasons for the breach were being investigated.
Joshimath is located on a hill slope, and sits on the debris of old landslides.
The small town is the gateway to revered Hindu and Sikh shrines and a popular pit-stop for trekkers and skiers drawn to nearby slopes when it snows, fuelling construction activity.
Until this month, bulldozers were being used to widen the road to the town to improve access. Following the protests of recent weeks, the roadworks were halted.
Officials and geologists examining the damage in Joshimath think 2021 flash floods that washed away the Rishiganga mini-hydropower project and claimed nearly 200 lives — were the trigger to Joshimath’s present-day troubles.
“Reports of cracks in homes started then,” said Swapnamita Choudhury Vaideswaran, a scientist with the Dehradun-based Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, a research organisation. Vaideswaran, also a member of the state’s expert committee examining the scale of damage, said the NTPC tunnel was too far away to be responsible for the cracks.
Started in 2008, the 520-megawatt Tapovan-Vishnugad Hydropower Plant on the Dhaulganga River is likely to be completed within a year, said officials who also blamed construction work for the subsidence.