Renuka Dam, Sirmaur
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A backgrounder
As in 2024
Abhilash Gaur, June 17, 2024: The Times of India
From: Abhilash Gaur, June 17, 2024: The Times of India
Last week, Delhi was grappling with Haryana and Himachal Pradesh for water in the Supreme Court. Big numbers – 137 cusecs, 150 cusecs – got tossed around. A cusec is 28.3 litres of water per second. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. Do the math and you are looking at 33.5 crore to 36.7 crore litres a day.
It’s a lot of water, but nothing compared with what Delhi could have got every summer, without begging, pleading, fighting and litigating, had a long-promised dam been built on a small, unsung river 250km away.
A River Called Giri
The Giri is a small, perennial river that arises from springs at Kharapathar in Shimla district’s apple belt. It flows down, gathers volume, skirts the famous Renuka Lake in Sirmaur, and tumbles into the Yamuna after running a 150km course. One look at it in summer or winter, and you would scoff at the idea that it could be Delhi’s saviour. But it swells up in the monsoon, and during last year’s flood it was pushing 32 lakh litres of water every second. And that’s not even close to its record. In September 1978, it went on the rampage with a discharge of 85 lakh litres per second.
Just think, if you had a dam to store all that water in the monsoon, and then release it to quench Delhi’s thirst…
A Dam Called Renuka
The idea is almost as old as the Swedish band Abba. In 1976, when Abba were making waves with ‘Dancing Queen’ and ‘Money, Money, Money’, engineers of Himachal Pradesh’s power department were pondering the feasibility of building a 140m dam at Dadahu near Renuka Lake that would generate 40MW of electricity and supplement Delhi’s water supply.
Almost two decades later, in 1993, Himachal Pradesh State Electricity Board made a detailed project report for the proposed ‘Renuka Dam’ with Delhi’s water supply among its objectives.
By the early 2000s, it was decided that the dam would supply 23,000 litres of water per second (23 cumecs) to Delhi in the lean months. For perspective, that’s 812 cusecs of assured additional supply. Yet, 20 years on, there is no dam at Dadahu.
Reports have been made, estimates drawn, approvals given. And all have lapsed, again and again, while Delhi’s population rose from 1.4 crore in 2001 to 1.7 crore in 2011, and is now creeping towards 2.7 crore in 2036.
‘This Time Is Different’
Inside the Renuka Dam Project office in Dadahu, behind general manager RK Chaudhary’s chair, hangs a board with the names of his predecessors. There have been 11 GMs before him, counting from February 4, 2009. That was shortly after Renuka Dam was declared a project of national importance, entitled to 90% funding from the Centre.
All of them came and went without leaving a mark on the ground, but Chaudhary is confident work will get underway before his tenure ends in September this year. In fact, he’s hopeful of two significant developments this week: the final forest clearance for building the dam, and the first set of engineering drawings from Central Water Commission. “CWC is likely to send us the drawings by June 20,” he says.
Rampur To Dalhousie
Chaudhary says there were two major hurdles that delayed the dam for years. The first was the absence of an agreement between the six states that have a stake in Yamuna waters (Giri is a tributary of Yamuna). That was resolved in Janu- ary 2019 when Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, UP, Himachal and Uttarakhand signed an MoU regarding the Renuka Dam. Roughly three years later, in December 2021, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) approved central funding for the dam, and PM Modi laid its foundation stone on December 27, 2021.
However, one major hurdle still remained. As the dam’s reservoir would have submerged many acres of forest, Himachal Pradesh Power Corporation Limited (HPPCL), the agency in charge of the TIMES project, was required to take up compensatory afforestation on twice the area.
“We didn’t have that much land in Dadahu or anywhere else,” says Chaudhary, so between April 2023 and February this year, his team coordinated with Himachal forest officials to find pockets of barren land suitable for afforestation. “We’ve found the land but it’s spread over 19 forest divisions in the state, ranging from Dalhousie in Chamba district to Rampur on the edge of Kinnaur,” says Chaudhary.
His team submitted its ca- se to the Ministry of Environment and Forests on February 19 – “well in time” – and he’s looking forward to the final clearance “any day now”.
What about funding? Have the six states paid their shares? Chaudhary, who was in Delhi on June 12 for a meeting to discuss fund monitoring for the project, laughs and says he can’t name the ones who haven’t, but “Delhi has paid a surplus”.
Picking Contractors
Even if the forest clearance comes in this week, or in a couple of weeks, nothing can happen on the ground till October because the Giri will be up to its monsoon tricks. But other processes will be running in the background. “We are on the verge of tendering,” says Chaudhary. That’s the most important step for picking companies that will execute the different works. And if tendering is finished during the monsoon, the next important step of diverting the river could start before 2024 ends.
But Wait Till 2032
So, if the dam’s construction starts this year, how many years would it be before the Giri’s water boosts the pressure in Delhi’s taps? Chaudhary consults his notes and says, “If work on the ground commences in November-December this year, it will take until January 2030 to finish.”
But that won’t solve Delhi’s problems right away. The dam is only a wall. There’s a 24kmlong reservoir behind it that would need to be filled up. “The normal practice is to let a dam’s reservoir fill up first,” says Chaudhary, adding, “the reservoir has a capacity of 498 million cubic metres (roughly half a trillion litres). It will take 1.5 years to fill up.” So, realistically, the earliest that Delhi can get relief via the Renuka Dam is 2032. Until then, the Capital can continue to beg, plead, fight and litigate.
