Bharat Seth

India has a new environment minister in Anil Madhav Dave.

Last week, India’s Minster of Power went on record saying that India can meet its electricity demand for the next ten years without installing any additional hydropower capacity. This proclamation is a fillip to activists campaigning against the destructive cascade of hydropower dams planned in the upper reaches of Himalayan rivers.

The people's struggle in the Teesta River basin in Sikkim (India) has gone through a change of guard recently. Tseten Lepcha stepped down as working president earlier this year. He had a telephone conversation with Bharat Lal Seth on the changes in their approach to campaigning for a pro-people environment in the Himalayan state.

Vimal Bhai is the Convener of Matu Jan Sangathan, a collective that has been advocating for rights of communities impacted by large hydropower projects and dams in India’s Himalayan state of Uttarakhand.

Proponents claimed that privatizing India's Maheshwar Dam would speed up construction and bring in needed funds. Now it looks like public money will once again be used to pull a private company out of trouble.

An interview with Soumya Dutta of the Beyond Copenhagen collective. We talk with him about India's electricity growth trajectory and the future of renewables.

The Mapithel valley in northeast India is changing drastically right now, as waters rise behind the Mapithel Dam. Jitin Yumnam explores what it's like to be flooded out of your home.

In January this year, the Thoubal River was impeded by the Mapithel Dam. In the pipeline since the 1980s, the commissioning of the dam meant that the backwater reservoir slowly began to rise, fill and spread, even though resettlement had not been completed. A despicable act by the Manipur government to forcefully commission the Thoubal Multipurpose Project. By June, due to the rains in the northeastern Indian state, the dam reservoir began to rise rapidly and submerged an extensive area of Chadong village, where many project-affected people reside. The reservoir began to submerge their agricultural land, grazing grounds and forest.

The Sardar Sarovar Dam on the River Narmada – perhaps the most controversial dam project in the world – continues to create conflicts between the Indian government, the courts, and the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the dam. Last month, a six-member team comprising officials from two national political parties and independent experts conducted a fact-finding tour to understand the ground realities concerning the project.

Last month, the two-member South Asia team travelled to the West Sikkim Hills, a northern Indian region nestled in the Himalayan mountains, to visit hydroelectric project (HEP) sites and speak with project-affected people. During our travels, the Gorkha earthquake on April 25, with its epicenter in Nepal, was felt across north India. Hundreds of buildings crumbled, killing thousands in Nepal.

Last year the Jhelum River Basin received unprecedented rainfall in the Kashmir Valley. It was the wettest September in recorded history; several weather stations broke their 24 and 48 hour records.

Disclaimer: This is a minority report from the “International Conference on Hydropower for Sustainable Development”, which I attended the first week of February at Dehradun, India. The title was a bit of an oxymoron; a more suitable one would have been: “International Conference for Sustainable Development of the Hydropower Sector”.

Some three or four years back I travelled to the Alaknanda River Basin in Uttarakhand. At the time I was working as a journalist and writing a story on the Pinder River, the last free-flowing tributary of the mighty Alaknanda.