Media365
Doobi Jando Jaunsar, Doobi Jando Sirmaur is a song that is quickly gaining traction in the valleys towards the west of the Dehradun valley. People are dismayed that the djinn of the Kishau Dam has reawakened suddenly. A palpable fear has gripped these beautiful hamlets.
A recent documentary titled How to Live on Earth, narrated by British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, highlights how indigenous communities in the United States came together to fight legal battles to get rid of four hydroelectric dams, ensuring that the salmon, a fish the communities treat as their ancestor spirit, are able to reach spawning grounds in the mountain streams. In a day and age where the world is increasingly becoming aware of the pitfalls of hydropower, and that alternative technologies promise to yield much cleaner power at lower costs, the Doon Valley will have to suffer yet another dam upstream of the Yamuna. Delhi’s ever-growing thirst for drinking water is now going to be Doon Valley’s curse.
With six states coming together to sign an agreement on what is being described as a long-delayed national project, the decks have been cleared for the Kishau Multipurpose Project on the river Tons, in the Yamuna basin. The proposed 236 m dam is expected to store 1,562 million cubic metres of water, irrigate 97,000 hectares and generate 1,476 million units of hydropower, according to the government. The planning, however, is pre-independence, and the impacts on ecology and human settlements have not been accounted for at all. This is evident in the completely differing figures appearing on the websites of the hydro-power corporations of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, while a completely new set of figures is presented in the agreement.
When the chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi and Haryana signed an agreement in the presence of the Union Home Minister, it rang out for many as the death knell for some of the most picturesque and resource-rich villages of the Tons Valley. From the river plateau of Kwanu, a village that is home to upwards of four thousand families, upriver to the Tiuni bridge, the entire valley faces submergence. These tribal villages, part of the Dehradun district, contribute substantively to agriculture, animal husbandry, forests, fisheries and local livelihoods. Ginger, tomato, turmeric, cabbage and groundnut cultivation, in particular, are the mainstay of the economy here. The region also offers abundant horticultural produce. More than 17 villages face submergence.
Touted by the central government as the tenth instance of a resolution of a long-standing inter-state dispute, the project seems to be a gift laced with poisonous deceit for the city of Dehradun and the region of Jaunsar-Bawar, a tribal, Schedule V region, where inhabitants and their local councils are supposed to exercise control over their resources. There seems to be no room for empathy for the thousands who will lose their precious land, homesteads, and an ancient way of life.
The first act of deception lies in the name of the project. For a project that was conceived as early as 1940, with virtually no homework on aspects such as seismic vulnerability, displacement data and environmental impact studies, the project site has been shifted from Kishau to Sambarlekha in Uttarakhand and Maina Vaas in Himachal Pradesh. Continuing with the name Kishau, a village situated in Himachal Pradesh some 15 kilometres distant from the dam site, gives the false impression that the project has little to do with Uttarakhand. Hence, there is not even a murmur in the Uttarakhand media on the issue, while the dam itself, and the larger habitable villages, are right at the doorstep of the interim capital, Dehradun, the site itself being upstream of the Tons, just 70 km away from the city.
In fact, the Kishau site was chosen for the project in the 1940s and later abandoned because geological studies indicated a high risk due to earthquakes. The current agreement on the project, based on outdated data on seismic vulnerability and displacement, and a complete absence of any environmental impact assessment, must be read as ominous portents for the Dehradun valley, already reeling under historically unheard-of disasters such as floods and waterlogging, rapid urbanisation, and massive deforestation owing to ill-conceived “development” projects. The valley already has over 13 dam projects around it, and another project, with a massive 2950-hectare reservoir, will pose further danger to it. The project is likely to create a 32 km lake of dead and still water from Mohrad to Tiuni, covering about 2,438 acres of biodiversity-rich forest land. Whether the valley can absorb the impact of submerging a forest with more than 1.5 million trees is a question people must ask before it is too late.
Constructing a massive block on the Tons River will definitely alter natural sediment deposition, water currents, and benthic habitats. The project will threaten fish nurseries, migratory routes, and local aquatic life, much in the same way the nearby Ichchadi project has done for another valley in the Yamuna basin. The upper Yamuna and Tons basin lies within the highly volatile, seismically active Middle Himalayas usually classified as Zone IV and Zone V. Environmentalists point out that the structural safety of building what is going to be India’s second-highest gravity dam on an active fault line presents catastrophic reservoir-induced seismicity risks. Experts also opine that the creation of a 32-km-long reservoir will saturate the surrounding fragile mountain slopes, accelerating slope failures and flash landslides, already common to the region.
In times when technology has progressed to an extent that alternatives such as solar and wind energy can produce power without permanently changing river ecosystems or displacing large communities, clearing the way for another mega dam raises suspicion, especially since we all know who the contractual beneficiaries of such a project shall be.
What is worse is that while both Uttarakhand and Himachal will suffer due to the ecological damage, the latter seems to have driven a hard bargain in the September 2026 agreement. According to the recent agreement, while Delhi and Rajasthan have agreed to absorb Himachal Pradesh’s Rs. 2,000 crore power liability in a 75:25 ratio in exchange for consumptive water, Uttarakhand has failed to negotiate even this specific financial relief. Uttarakhand chief minister’s mysterious silence and acquiescence on the terms of this agreement, even though Uttarakhand and its capital, a fragile valley, will bear the brunt of the ill-conceived project, leave many questions unanswered.
The writer is an anthropologist and author
