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 Pradesh—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 of 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 — a figure straight out of Shangri-La — 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 monetized 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 primarily 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 — 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.
Ironically, 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, a Fulbright-Nehru
Fellow, is studying climate change adaptation along the Brahmaputra River,
where the environment challenges the region faces are likely to be repeated in
other parts of developing Asia. His dispatches will appear regularly in India
Ink. Last month, he wrote about the
volatility of the Brahmaputra. Source: NYTimes
