Central Water Commission is India's apex technical organization for water resources development. It advises the central and state governments on water resources planning and development projects. India has significant untapped hydropower potential but development has been hindered by various conflicts. Social conflicts arise from inadequate resettlement and compensation for displaced people. Environmental conflicts stem from disagreements over environmental flows in rivers downstream of dams. Strategies like participatory decision making, consensus on optimal environmental flows, and addressing livelihood impacts can help promote sustainable hydropower development.

1. Hydropower for Energy Security and
Sectoral conflicts
PK Saxena
Chief Engineer
Central Water Commission
Government of India
Policy for Science and Science for Policies

2. About Central Water Commission
 Established in 1945. Apex technical organisation in the field of water resources
development and main technical arm of Ministry of Water Resources, RD&GR.
 Strength of 730 IES officers and about 4000 technical and Secretarial staff spread over
13 regional offices across India and head quarters at New Delhi
 advises the Central and State governments in planned utilisation of water resources of
the country as a whole
 Advises GoI on international and inter state water disputes and Treaties
 carry out Techno-economic appraisal of Irrigation, flood control & multipurpose
projects proposed by the State Governments.
 Acts as central bureau of information for hydrological matters.
 To provide flood forecasting services to all major flood prone inter-state river basins of
India through a network of 175 flood forecasting stations.
 Monitoring of selected major and medium irrigation projects under central assistance
 undertake necessary surveys and investigation and designs of water resources projects

3. THE PARADOX
 India’s per capita power consumption
is among the lowest in the world
 China has a per capita consumption
of 3500kWh, with developed nations
averaging around 15,000kWh
 Around 280 million people in the
country do not have access to
electricity.
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
China USA India Russia Japan Canada Germany
5649
4297
1208
1064 1061
615 614
Energy Generation in TWh
 power shortage is one of the
greatest obstacles to development.
 prevent farmers from improving
their agricultural incomes
 Affects ease of doing business in
India, hampering the development
of industry and commerce and
creation of jobs
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
23658
15615
14290
12954
7344 7270
3475
1010
Per Capita Consumption KWh

4. Energy Scenario
 The total demand in India is expected to cross 950 GW by 2030.
 We need to triple the generation in 15 years for sustainable development

5. Why Hydro ?
 A 500 megawatt coal plant puts out, each year 10,000
tons of sulfur dioxide which is the main cause of acid
rain, 10,200 tons of nitrogen oxide, 720 tons of
carbon monoxide and 3.7 million tons of carbon
dioxide, 500 tons of SPM apart from many other toxic
heavy metals like lead, arsenic and cadmium. The 8
billion litre of water it uses for cooling raises the lake
temperature
 Need sustainable alternate energy sources
 Clean and renewable. Non consumptive
 instantaneous starting, stopping. Natural choice
for meeting the peak demand.
 Inflation free generation
 helps in conserving scarce and fossil fuels
 Importance to meet the acute energy needs of our
country in coming years.

6. Why Hydro ?
 India ranks 5th in terms of exploitable hydro-potential on global scenario.
 India’s viable hydro potential 1,48,701 MW of installed capacity.
 In addition, 94,000 MW through 56 number of pumped storage projects and
6,782 MW from small, mini & micro schemes
 Thus, the total hydro-potential of about 2 50 000 MW
 Installed capacity as on July 31, 2015 is 41,997.42 MW which is one third of
the potential and only 15.22% of total electricity generation in India.
 In any plan for energy security, particularly “Make in India” campaign
hydropower plays a dominant role

7. Dwindling share of Hydropower in India
 The ideal hydro-thermal mix ratio for Indian condition is 40:60.
 The share of hydropower in our country continued declining since 1963 from
50% in 1963 to about 15 % in 2015.
 Over 55% of Northern and 93% of the potential in the NER region untapped
37.3
32.69
50.61
40.02
17.4
12.01
17.52
14.18
15.3
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
%ofHydropowertototalcapacity
Hydropower v/s total capacity

8. Prime Minister 50000 MW initiative
 An initiative of installing 50,000 MW large hydro projects in the country was
announced by the government in 2003.
 It mandated specific timeframes for clearances to eliminate time and cost
overruns in project implementation. :
 Central Electricity Authority (CEA) has issued various hydroelectric related
reports and guides in public domain like
 best practices in Hydroelectric Generation;
 Preliminary ranking study of hydroelectric scheme
 Guidelines for formulation of DPRs for HE scheme
 Draft model contract document for hydro projects;
 Project monitoring status reports;
 Project clearance status reports and
 Status of 50,000 MW Hydroelectric Initiative reports
 CEA prepared PFRs of 162 schemes ahead of schedule.

9. Reality Check
 Currently, around 11,400 MW of projects are reeling under time and cost
overruns. At least 21 hydropower projects facing time overruns of five or
more years
 4 projects abandoned in 2008 including Loharinag Pala (600 MW) of NTPC. A
big setback
 Between 2014 to 2015, only 736 MW of hydropower could be added
 So far only about 2859 MW has been commissioned through the private
route (as of May 2015), which constitutes less than 7% of the total installed
hydropower capacity
 government’s target of adding 10,800 MW of hydro power capacity in the XII
Plan may fall short by about 30 per cent by most optimistic estimate.
 Hon’ble Minister for Power admitted in LS that “uncertainties in the
hydropower sector were keeping investors away, despite the huge potential
and cited politics, environmental issues and court rulings being among the
various reasons”.

10. Reasons
Technical
Difficult terrain, geological surprises and adverse weather
Social Conflict
Land acquisition
Environmental Conflict
Resistance from environmentalists

11. Social Conflict – R&R
 Oustees are not direct beneficiary of the hydropower
projects
 Primarily are agrarian by profession; hence loss of land
would mean loss of profession and means of
livelihood for the affected families.
 R&R has been confined to payment of compensation
for the acquisition of land in accordance with the Land
Acquisition Act, 1894.
 In absence of a national policy each project prepares an individual package for
R&R and when the PAPs do not accept the package or its implementation is
delayed and not followed in true spirit, the dispute starts.
 In most of the projects the work suffers because of poor design or unsatisfactory
R&R package.
 “Parachute leaders” make the matter worse

12. Environment Conflict
 In RoR projects where water is returned to the river after
generation were not perceived to have any appreciable
effect on environment
 Till nineties, the environment and social concerns
related to water resources projects were mostly focused
on upstream of dam
 SC judgment in 1999 on minimum flow in the Yamuna River through New
Delhi shifted focus to downstream reach as well
 It was then believed that the environment flow in absolute terms is enough to
conserve the river ecosystem
 While the domestic and agriculture requirements are easily quantified, it is
difficult to decide as to what comprises the legitimate ecological needs
 The working group of WQAA advocated simple hydrological methods to
determine EFR. All methods have an element of subjectivity and often termed
as biased
 Opposition to hydropower projects is also not backed with any systematic
studies and as a result, this conflict continues to be a major stumbling block

13. How much is too much ?
 Ensuring a fair and equitable allocation to ensure
sustainability of both project and the environment
requires a thorough analysis and studies
 Extensive work has been carried out in this area in many
countries viz; South Africa, Australia, United States and
United Kingdom and more than 200 methodologies
have been developed.
 In an exercise, EFR was calculated based on practices in various countries
 The arrived flow requirement varied from 5 cumec to 80 cumec.
 This variation underlines the need of evolving a mechanism to arrive as
acceptable figures for environment flow.

14. STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Acceptance of Environment Flow as Optimal Flow
 Need for consensus to accept that no development can leave a river
in pristine condition. EF need to keep a balance between the
ecology and development and the trade-offs will be inevitable
 Such optimal flow can be assessed during the planning of the
projects and used as an input in the decision-making process
Formation of Multi-disciplinary Team of Experts
 A better approach is to fix an optimal flow based on desktop
methods and then constitute a multi-disciplinary team of experts
from different domains like hydrology, ecology, water quality,
sociology and morphology, who can form a consensus to arrive at
an optimal flow to balance development and ecology

15. STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
People’s Participation
 All stakeholders , particularly local populace and religious groups need to be
involved to imbibe a sense of ownership in them
 The people should be encouraged to voice their opinion and raise queries and
we must be prepared to address them
 The measures beneficial to public should precede the
work on development of the project for greater
acceptance amongst to the affected people
 The focus should be more on trust and understanding
rather than legislation and an opaque process
 The involvement of stakeholders can be looked into post construction activities
like implementation of mitigation measures, compensatory afforestation and
monitoring the implementation of environmental management plan
 Project Affected People have now been made long term beneficiary
stakeholders in the hydro projects by way of 1% of free power with a matching
1% support from State government for local area development

16. CONCLUSIONS
 The hydropower presents a reliable source of power
while enhancing economic activity by creating
employment opportunities, promoting the latent
demand and reducing pressure on conventional
sources of energy.
 It needs to be ensured that the positive impacts
substantially overshadow the negative consequences.
 A sustainable development plan to maximize the
benefits can be prepared while sharing benefits with
stakeholders
 The environment flow must be assessed in holistic
manner with multidimensional approach and
ensuring people’s participation.
 Issues of resettlement, sustainable livelihoods, cultural impacts and flood control
must be addressed for the project to have greater acceptability.

17. Using any source of energy has some environmental cost. It is
the degree of impact on the environment that is crucial. As
we learn to live in harmony as part of the environment, we
must seek the best alternatives among all ecologic, economic,
technological, and social perspectives. The longer we delay
the balanced development of our potential for hydropower,
the more we unnecessarily use up other vital resources
pksaxena-cwc@nic.in
The views expressed here are solely those of the presenter in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views
of the Central Water Commission, the Ministry of Water Resources ,RD&GR or the Government of India