A couple of years ago, Election Sitang, 20, who dropped out of middle school, sniffed an opportunity when Rengging village was developed as a viewpoint to provide a panoramic view of the river Siang. Rengging is a village 9 km uphill of Pasighat, the oldest town in Arunachal Pradesh and the headquarters of the East Siang district. It is some 70 km downhill from Sitang’s home village, Rango. As the Siang meanders towards Assam, it joins the Dibang and Lohit about 30 km downstream of Pasighat town to form the Brahmaputra.
Sitang runs a snacks-and-smokes shop — an extension of his thatched house — close to the viewpoint for visitors and drivers on the road that snakes up to Boleng, the Siang district headquarters, near his home village.
Sitang is a Minyong, a sub-group of the Adi community that dominates the central Arunachal Pradesh region nurtured by the Siang along the 230 km it flows from Gelling village on the India-Tibet border to Pasighat near the State’s boundary with Assam. “I left my village a few years ago to settle here for a living. Now, I hear my family back home and other villagers may have to leave Rango for good if a large dam is built upstream of the Siang,” he says.
He refers to a plan that began to take shape 15 years ago, to construct big dams on the Siang. Ahead of Union Power Minister Manohar Lal’s Arunachal Pradesh visit on July 8, Lower Dibang Valley-based activist Ebo Mili and Upper Siang-based advocate Dunge Apang, were detained. Apang is the convener of the Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum (SIFF), a collective representing the families of at least 1.5 lakh agriculturists from the Adi community, which will be affected if big dams come up.
The activists had wanted to submit a memorandum to the Minister that read: “The proposed Siang mega dam threatens our ancestral abode that hosts delicate ecosystems, wildlife habitats, and biodiversity. It threatens our way of life.”
Organisations in the Siang basin say the proposed project could submerge large tracts of agricultural land and affect 25 villages and two towns of indigenous Adi people upstream and some 30 villages downstream.
Acknowledging big-water power
Rango, like most villages of the Adis and their sub-tribes, is on the fertile banks of the Siang. The inhabitable and farm-suitable stretches of the banks of Siang’s tributaries such as the Simang, Siyom, and the “mad” Sibo Korong that disrupts life during the monsoon, also sport villages and hamlets with populations ranging from 50 to 4,000.
Sitang was named Election by his father as he was born on the day of voting for the 2004 Assembly poll in Arunachal Pradesh. The name turned ironic, when in 2009, the next election year, big dams were born as an issue. This was the year after then Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu’s Congress government formulated the Hydro Power Policy to tap an estimated potential of generating more than 57,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity, apart from about 1,600 MW through micro, mini, and small hydropower projects.
Election Sitang, a Siang riverbank resident, at Rengging, where he moved to when he sensed an opportunity.
| Photo Credit:
Rahul Karmakar
During Dorjee Khandu’s tenure, the Arunachal Pradesh government signed 233 memoranda of understanding with 159 private and public companies for projects with power generation capacities of 47,000 MW. What alarmed many residents of the Siang river basin was the identification of 26 projects on the Siang and 18 of its tributaries. The biggest of these was the 11,000 MW Siang Upper.
Now, Bhanu Tatak, SIFF’s legal adviser, says, “We have come to know the Siang Upper project has been upscaled to almost 12,000 MW, reflecting a change in Chief Minister Pema Khandu’s stance after returning to power. While campaigning in the Siang region during the April 2024 election, he went on record saying that his party [the Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP] will not pursue any dam if the locals are against it.” Pema Khandu is the eldest son of Dorjee Khandu, the architect of Arunachal Pradesh’s ‘dam rush’ who died in a helicopter crash in April 2011.
Almost all private players, including Reliance, gave up plans for the proposed big dams in Arunachal Pradesh for which MoUs had been signed more than a decade ago. But the push for achieving a “net-zero carbon emissions goal” by 2070, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised at COP26 (Conference of the Parties) in November 2021, was strong.
In August 2023, the government handed over 12 hydropower projects relinquished by private players, to three Central PSUs: the NHPC, the North Eastern Electric Power Corporation (NEEPCO) Limited, and the Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam (SJVN) Limited.
“The private sector no longer sees these projects as economically viable and that is why they did not develop them even after putting in a lot of resources over the years. In the end, they sold it to the PSUs, at a loss in many cases. The public sector has no accountability, so they can implement unviable projects,” says Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, a collective of people and groups working on issues around water.
Paying obeisance to a revered river
Two of these 12 projects with a total installed capacity of 3,800 MW, both on the Subansiri river upstream, were awarded to the NHPC. Five projects (total installed capacity of 5,097 MW) in the Dibang river basin were given to the SJVN, while NEEPCO received the remaining five (2,626 MW) in the Siang river basin. Protests against the Dibang projects by two anti-dam NGOs were nipped in the bud with the detention of activists Ebo Mili and Mejo Mihu in August 2023, and the NEEPCO projects on four tributaries of the Siang also saw a few protests. But what really upset the Adis was the Siang Upper mega plan.
“For the Adis adhering to the indigenous faith, Siang is more than just a river. We call her Aane, meaning mother. She sustains us and is intrinsic to our cultural identity. We believe her water heals, has a spiritual effect, and resolves land disputes and other conflicts. People here will hardly bat an eyelid if more than 20 of the major tributaries of Siang are dammed but we will not tolerate any chhedchhad (tinkering) with our mother,” Oyar Gao, a veteran anti-dam activist in the Siang River Belt, says.
An anti-dam protest in Upper Siang district ahead of the Lok Sabha poll.
| Photo Credit:
Rahul Karmakar
In his mid-60s, Gao is based in Siang district’s Pangin, about 60 km from Pasighat. He formed the Siang Bachao Forum in 1980 when the newly instituted Brahmaputra Board began exploring the hydropower potential of Himalayan rivers in Arunachal Pradesh. Now associated with the SIFF, he has vowed to resist any bid to dam the Siang “as long as I live”.
Anticipating a Chinese water bomb
The Siang river projects gained traction in 2017 when Chief Minister Pema Khandu and his Cabinet colleagues met with NITI Aayog officials in New Delhi and announced that the 6,000 MW Siang Stage-I and the 3,750 MW Stage-II would be punched into the Siang Upper Multipurpose Project entailing a 300-metre-high dam.
The renewed interest in Siang has been linked to China’s proposed construction of a 60,000 MW project on the Yarlung Tsangpo in the Tibetan Autonomous Region’s Medog County about 30 km from the border with Arunachal Pradesh. Originating in the Angsi Glacier near Mount Kailash, the Yarlung Tsangpo is one of the highest rivers on earth and flows more than 1,100 eastward in Tibet before taking a sharp southern turn at the ‘Great Bend’ to flow down as the Siang in India.
The official argument has been that the mega project in Tibet, coupled with China’s reported plan to divert the Yarlung Tsangpo by constructing a 1,000-km canal and the storage of a large volume of water at the Great Bend project could be detrimental to India. This could result in a ‘water bomb’ from Beijing, causing large-scale devastation through artificial floods during the monsoon season in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam downstream.
Another claim is that the Chinese project would reduce lean season flows in the Siang, affecting the feasibility of any hydropower project in the lower stretches of the river. A mega project with a large water reservoir in the upper section of the Siang was eventually advocated. The reservoir, it is said, will keep the Siang alive during the lean season and absorb any flood water released after the construction of the Great Bend project.
“It will be naive to brush the Chinese threat aside as the world knows how Beijing, which considers water management data to be a state secret, built 11 massive dams on the Mekong river in the 1990s without keeping five downstream countries, including Thailand and Vietnam, in the picture. At the same time, using the Chinese plans on the Yarlung Tsangpo as an excuse to pursue mega projects on the Siang is an invitation to disaster given the fragility of the geologically young Himalayas, especially the eastern half, in a highly earthquake-prone zone,” says an Assam-based hydrologist, who asks that his identity not be revealed.
He cited a couple of instances of landslips at NHPC’s under-construction 2,000-MW Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project to drive home his point. A landslip in November 2023 blocked a diversion tunnel of the project, affecting the flow through the river. “The China factor does not work for rivers like the Subansiri as its source across the border in Tibet cannot be dammed. It is a threat for Assam downstream, but not as much as mega dams on the upper reaches of the Siang would be, particularly for the Daying Ering Wildlife Sanctuary in Arunachal Pradesh and the Dibru-Saikhowa National Park in Assam downstream, as studies almost a decade ago revealed,” he says. He asks that the region “not be made a pawn in the race between China and India”.
Gao says that the Siang gets only about 40% of the water from the Yarlung Tsangpo and 60% from its tributaries, mostly within India.
Opposing today, proposing tomorrow
The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, during the formulation of the Hydro Power Policy, favoured exercising “first user” rights on waters flowing from China by developing big hydropower projects on the Siang. “If we do not construct the dam on the Siang, our position to negotiate with China will be lost,” Jairam Ramesh, then the Environment Minister, told a joint delegation of anti-dam groups from Arunachal Pradesh and Assam in August 2010.
The BJP, then in the Opposition, were against mega dams that cause displacement and threaten the ecology. At an election rally in Pasighat in 2014, Modi had said he preferred smaller hydropower projects in the region, honouring the sentiments of the local people.
In February 2015 though, once in power, he said at an official function on the 29th Statehood Day in Itanagar that Arunachal Pradesh could light up the entire country with major hydropower projects. “I know the people of Arunachal Pradesh have certain reservations about some hydro projects. There were similar issues in Bhutan and Nepal, which have as many water resources. We negotiated with them… You, too, have similartaakat(strength) and you need to realise it to ensure progress and prosperity,” he said.
“Huge contracts and kickbacks are involved in building mega dams compared to the much more viable and safer micro and small dams. This is one of the reasons why anti-dam activists unfortunately turn pro-dam,” Gao says.
In a memorandum to the State’s Deputy Chief Minister Chowna Mein, who holds the Power portfolio, on July 17, the SIFF named one such activist: Ojing Tasing, now a BJP legislator from Siang district’s Pangin constituency and the Minister for Rural Development and Panchayati Raj. The forum said Tasing “led the anti-dam movement with the trust of the people but as soon as he came to power, he forgot his commitment to our cause”.
“Through an RTI, we learned that the Prime Minister’s Office sought pre-construction activities in the ‘anti-dam’ areas to convince people,” Tatak says. SIFF alleges that the pre-construction activities were funded by the corporate social responsibility (CSR) money of PSUs. “This is a violation of CSR guidelines as the funds cannot be given to existing government schemes,” says Tatak.
Tasing says he favours “balancing development with sustainable dams and it is silly to presume CSR activities will automatically lead to the construction of a mega dam, which is in the proposal stage and unlikely to start before 2034”. He claims the Adi Bane Kebang, the apex body of the Adis, has sought a pre-feasibility report (PFR) on Siang Upper.
Anti-dam farmers in the Yingkiong region of Upper Siang district sensed the government was trying to “manufacture consent” for the mega dam when the local authorities convened a meeting with panchayat leaders and headmen of 12 villages to be affected most by the proposed project. Tarok Siram, the headman of Parong village, says they were asked not to oppose the dam in national interest. “This is particularly worrying because the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act of 2023 allows the Centre to divert forests for national strategic projects within 100 km of India’s international borders without the need for any forest clearance,” Tatak says.
The SIFF, which took the Siang dam issue to a United Nations forum more than a year ago, insisted the PFR would be against a Gauhati High Court verdict in 2023 that said the Arunachal Pradesh government should pursue dams after taking into consideration the safety, security, and all other aspects of the project-affected people.
“We cannot let our people suffer from what Sikkim went through last year, after the glacial lake outburst flood washed away the 1,200 MW Teesta-III and affected two other dams of the NHPC, which had earlier claimed their projects were resistant to such disasters,” SIFF president Gegong Jijong says.
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