Surface Water

This past weekend was the only international film festival on water, worldwide—Voices from the Water, held in Bangalore in several different locations. Working for a water NGO, I made my schedule free to catch up on some of these movies, to understand what the current issues are and what the film circle is capturing through their lens that we don’t necessarily see from our biased eyes.

Dr G.D. Agrawal’s tapasya, his third fast-unto-death, has finally achieved the desired result.  Since 2008, Dr Agrawal has been trying to persuade the Government of Uttarakhand and the Government of India that R. (Bhagirathi) Ganga must be allowed to flow in its natural state in the uppermost reach between Gangotri and Uttarkashi.  The two governments had plans to construct three new large hydropower projects in this stretch.  Dr Agrawal’s fasts have led to the scrapping of all the three projects.

Reviews of some of the movies screened -

“Be water, My friend”

This UNESCO funded film, “Be water, My friend” tracks the research of Professor Gordon Lightgoot, an expert on ancient water monuments as he tries to understand and rectify the alarming drying up of Karez’s in northern Iragi region of Kurdistan.

The quantity and seasonality of water flow in a river may greatly change from its normal condition between a major storage and downstream, thus paving the way for drastic changes in the riverine ecosystem. ‘Environmental flow’ refers to the amount of water considered sufficient for protecting the structure and function of an ecosystem and its dependent species.

The paper goes on to describe the case of river Bhadra, which is the site of a dam that has significantly altered the natural flow of the river and describes the study that aimed at conducting the environment flow analysis of the river.

This document published by IWMI and CGIAR describes the details of the Polavaram project, which has been planned by the state of Andhra Pradesh as a multi-purpose project:

• to provide irrigation benefits to the upland areas
• to provide a water supply to the industries in Visakhapatnam city, including the Steel Plant, for the generation of hydropower
• for the development of navigation and recreation facilities.

The project envisages the construction of an earth-cum-rock filled dam that is 1,600 m long across the Godavari River at Polavaram, and about 42 km upstream of the Godavari Barrage at Dowlaiswaram.

This paper deals with basin water use accounting and is a contribution to the synthesis work of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food's (CPWF) Basin Focal Projects. It provides a means to assess the interactions between water, food, poverty, and the environment and helps develop sound information about water availability in a basin, where it goes and how it is used.

The paper by the Institute for Social and Economic Change documents the case of Ward No. 39 situated at the outskirts of the Bangalore city to understand the emerging groundwater crisis due to overdraft in urban areas. Bangalore has no perennial river, which resulted in the growth of many lakes, acting as a source of groundwater recharge earlier.

This report by the World Commission on Dams begins by arguing that the debate about dams is a much broader issue and is important for everyone since it is a debate about the very meaning, purpose and pathways for achieving development. It is complex because the issues are not confined to the design, construction and operation of dams themselves, but include a range of social, environmental and political choices that define development.

Dams fundamentally alter rivers and the use of a natural resource, frequently entailing a reallocation of benefits from local riparian users to new groups of beneficiaries at a regional or national level. At the heart of the dams debate are fundamental issues of equity, governance, justice and power. The report argues that the main challenge lies in reconciling the competing needs between different groups of actors and provides a framework to deal with these fundamental issues in the dam debate.

The India Water Portal is pleased to announce to its users, that a comprehensive archive of over two hundred and fifty technical research reports of the National Institute of Hydrology (NIH), Roorkee, have now been made available on the portal, and in the public domain for the first time.

This document by Urgewald provides a brief overview on the role of India's premier dam building agency, the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) in the construction of dams in India and is highly critical of the mode in which the NHPC has been aggressively expanding its operations of building dams across rivers in the country. 

It aims to inform the public, investors and financiers about NHPC’s track record and expansion plans and presents compiled information from three regions where NHPC has been actively involved in the construction of dams namely:

• Narmada Valley in Central India
• Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh in Northeastern India
• The lands of the Kuki people in Northwestern Burma, where NHPC is building a dam for the military junta.