Himalaya, the "Mountains of Concrete": a review
This blog entry appeared on http://tibetanplateau.blogspot.com in March 2009.
Mountains of Concrete: Dam Building in the Himalayas
is a fine new report that looks at dam building trends in Pakistan,
India, Nepal and Bhutan. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first
critical report of its scope and focus, definitely a welcome
contribution to our debates over dam building issues in the region. The
exclusion of Tibet and China from the scope of the report, however,
renders an incomplete regional or Himalayan context, given the impact
of these areas on the overall health of transboundary waters. Lack of
information and resources, explains the report, are the reasons why
Tibet and China have been left out of discussion. This is personally
very disappointing as I believe the information and resources are out
there, if only the author and the publisher had dug more deeply to find
them.
The report, however, does dedicate
a full-page story (Box #4, page 20): “China ‘Goes Out’ to Build
Himalayan Dams.” It provides a brief overview of Chinese dam-building
expertise and the politico-economic context under which it is ‘going
out’ to build “hundreds of dams” in South Asia, Africa, South America,
Central Asia and other regions of the world. In South Asia, the report
says that “Chinese companies have built or are building at least 13
projects in Nepal and nine in Pakistan.” There is a quick mention of
Chinese plans to build a dam on Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra), an idea
that is alarming to the downstream countries of India and Bangladesh.
Since Tibet is the headwaters to many of the major rivers discussed in
the report and there are innumerable dams built and planned on the
Tibetan Plateau, we can only hope that International Rivers will take
up this incomplete project and produce a sequel report about Tibet and
China. Readers interested in getting a glimpse of Chinese dam-building
trends on the Tibetan Plateau are encouraged to read this paper.
That
said, I want to write a brief review/summary of the report to share
some of the many excellent points that are discussed. This 48-page
report is neatly divided into many different topical sections. The
first half of the report presents an informative country-by-country
discussion of dam-building trends, funding issues and the key players.
I found the discussions about Nepal and Bhutan most informative since
not much is known about dam issues in these two countries. I did not
realize until today that hydropower development represents the biggest
source of income for Nepal and Bhutan. According to the report, about
half of Bhutan’s national income comes from hydropower development.
Bhutan has an installed capacity of 1,448 MW and plans to increase it
to 15,693 MW. Nepal is more ambitious, it plans to install a total
capacity of 26,324 MW from its current installed capacity of 545 MW.
India’s goal is 93,615 MW from 15,208 MW. And for Pakistan, it is
33,769 MW from the existing capacity of 6,385 MW.
The drivers
of hydropower in Pakistan and India are different. Pakistan wants big
dams for irrigation and agriculture. India wants more hydropower due to
high demand for electricity, regional development and profits for power
companies. A look at sources of funds is also interesting. The
involvement of international financial institutions (IFI) such as the
World Bank and Asian Development Bank are common throughout the region.
For Bhutan, the main source of funds is India. Nepal has a more diverse
source of income, including domestic sources, private-public
partnerships, India as well as China. China is also an important funder
for Pakistan. Other sources of funds for Pakistan include internal
government sources, foreign private banks and income from sale of
power. India’s main funders are its government, domestic banks and
financial institutions.
Funding is the biggest challenge to
the developers. Even if all the available funds are added up, the
report estimates that 40% of the funds still remain unsecured. Power
sector reforms to raise necessary funds are essentially geared towards
privatization. The availability of funding is largely dependent on the
ability of the power sector to recover investments, which to me is
doubtful because of factors such as climate change, poor performance
track record of big dams in general, and the South Asian context of
corruption and unstable political regimes. However, I imagine the
greatest funding problem right now is the global economic crisis as
energy demands and investments in many parts of the world decline.
The
main argument of the first section is about the morality of the
economics of big dams in the region. Who are the ultimate winners and
who are the losers? While the paper does not question the role of state
in hydropower development in the tradition of post-structuralist
critics, it raises issues of equity and the plight of the poor and
affected people. Like everywhere else in the world, the prospective
winners are the banks and bureaucracies whose interests are directly
proportional to the size of investment and prospective profits. The
losers are the affected people, many of which are unique indigenous
people (Adivasis), and the environment. In fact, the report is
ultimately a warning that the Himalayas themselves and the whole region
would face grave consequences if its people and decision-makers fail to
act as its custodians.
The second half of Concrete Mountains
is dedicated to the social and environmental issues related to the
topic. There are a lot of topics covered in this section (downstream
impacts, loss of resource base, direct submergence, cultural impacts,
ecological impacts, seismicity and sedimentation, climate change, etc.)
that could have benefited from focus in terms of a specific target
audience that ideally is also relevant to the debate. This section also
provides a brief discussion on the response from affected people. I
have always been most impressed with the various anti-dam movements in
India. The national policy debates raised by the Narmada Bachao
Andolan, and the mobilization of affected people’s resistance not only
on the Narmada campaign but also other projects such as Teesta in the Northeast are inspiring examples for other dam-affected people. [TEAM
has translated the Citizens’ Guide to World Commission on Dams, an
activist organizational tool kit for people affected by dams, into Tibetan. We have sent a few copies to Teesta activists and are happy to send more copies for free to anyone who places an order.]
I
am pleased that the report rightly situates the debate within the
critical context of climate change. I believe climate change provides
an important, pertinent and powerful critique of dam development in the
region. If the glaciers and snows that feed the Himalayas are
disappearing, why build such giant, expensive and controversial
concrete structures? Some experts argue that big dams will be useful
for storage purposes if climate change results in changes to water flow
patterns. We can use the dams to store water when there is excess and
release when supply is scarce. This report rejects this argument.
Current dam projects, including those in the ‘pipeline,’ will not be
able to deliver the designed benefits since flows are expected to
decline significantly in the long run. Big dams in the Himalayas also
increase other risks that are more common to the region such as glacial
lake outburst floods (GLOFs) and seismicity.
Another important
point that I was delightfully surprised to see emphasized in this
report is the issue of cumulative impact of these dams. What will be
the long term added incremental impact of all these dams to the
region’s environment and economy? No one has the answer to this
question. Perhaps we will never know the answer to this question
beforehand but this is an important conceptual question for people and
policy makers concerned about the future of the region’s cultural and
ecological heritage. A step in the right direction toward understanding
cumulative impact is to improve and implement the project environmental
impact assessment requirements.
While such important points
are raised in the report, there is no discussion of certain other
relevant and important concepts such as minimum in-stream flows, ecosystem services (of headwaters and free flowing river, for example), and human rights impact assessment.
I think all of these concepts should be made relevant to any discussion
of dam project planning to minimize environmental and social costs. It
would have been very fitting for the report to include these concepts
as a part of its recommendations to governments and funders, a section
that is also missing in the report, which is my final critique. I would
have either expanded the final one-page discussion on “Alternative
Approaches” or included a set of recommendations for different target
audiences, such as governments, IFIs, affected local people groups such
as the Affected Citizens of Teesta.
It
is unfair to expect a report to cover all relevant topics under the
sun. For what it has set out to do, I think the report has achieved its
purpose barring the unfortunate exclusion of Tibet and China. I wish to
congratulate Shripad Sharmadhikary and the International Rivers for
releasing this informative critical report.