Himachal’s latest dam accident points to a pattern of negligence of dam safety

On the morning of May 10, residents of the village of Multhan in Himachal Pradesh’s Kangra district were about to begin their day, opening up shops in the market and heading out to tend to fields. Suddenly, at around 8 am, water gushed into the market, carrying with it silt and boulders that damaged agricultural fields, shops and houses.

Residents soon identified the cause of the flood – in the higher slopes of Multhan, the 25-MW Lambadug hydropower project, which was under construction, had suffered a failure. Its penstock pipe – the structure that carried water from Lambadug Khad, a tributary of the Beas river, to the power house to generate electricity – had leaked.

Around 80 families suffered losses. Between three and four acres of land with standing crops of potatoes were damaged, as were around 60 shops in the market, according to a local resident who requested anonymity because the administration was still in the process of evaluating and issuing compensation for damages.

The government of Himachal Pradesh had allotted the Lambadug project to KU Hydro Power, which has a common director with Megha Engineering Infrastructure Limited – recently released data on electoral bond purchases revealed that Megha Engineering was the second-highest purchaser of electoral bonds, and had spent Rs 966 crore on them. The company’s website indicates that its role in the Lambadug project is to construct the head race tunnel and desilting chamber, lay down transmission lines and construct the penstock pipe.

Accidents in hydropower projects are not new to Himachal Pradesh. Documentation by local organisations and Scroll’s research indicate that in the last ten years, at least 14 such incidents have occurred.

These include failures in operation, such as in a 2014 tragedy in which 25 people drowned in Beas river when the gates of Larji dam were opened without warning; as well as in construction, as in the 2021 collapse of a tunnel being constructed in the Parbati II hydro project in Kullu, which killed four labourers. In light of these frequent accidents on dam sites, activists and locals have raised questions about the lack of accountability for project proponents who construct dams and also oversee operations.

Their failure to ensure that dams are safe has not gone unnoticed by the state government. In August 2023, Himachal Pradesh’s directorate of energy noted that 21 of 23 hydel projects in the state had not complied with dam safety norms.

These norms are drawn from the Dam Safety Act, 2021, and the Central Water Commission’s guidelines on the matter. They mandate the formation of a national committee on dam safety, two dam safety bodies at the state level, as well as safety cells for each dam, set up by project proponents.

In a presentation to the state’s chief secretary, the directorate noted, among other problems, that many dams lacked early warning systems to ensure the timely release of excess water during monsoons, despite requests by administration to install them.

In response, the chief secretary vowed to “initiate legal action against the violators” and said he was considering “holding them accountable for criminal liability”.

But local activists point out that the government rarely takes such punitive action against companies. Manshi Asher, a researcher-activist with the Palampur-based Himdhara Environment Research and Action Collective said, “Even if in some cases punitive action against the project proponent has been taken in the state, it has been in the form of fines, but never in the form of a criminal case for negligence.”

Scroll emailed questions to the directorate of energy, the office of Kangra’s district collector, Megha Engineering, and the state’s pollution control board, about the failure of companies and the government to ensure that dams in the state are safe. This story will be updated if they respond.

Lambadug’s poor planning for disaster

Residents of Multhan told a three-member fact-finding team from Himdhara Collective, who visited the site a day after the May accident, that it was not the first time there had been a leak in Lambadug’s penstock pipe. “During the testing of the project three months ago, a similar leakage had taken place and they had been assured by the project authorities that the same had been fixed,” the fact-finding report stated.

The day the team visited, they noticed that there was a “landslide-like situation” at Lambadug’s dam site, and that “debris was continuing to move downhill”. The report also noted that portions of the penstock were cracked.

The dam’s environment impact assessment report indicates that Lambadug’s administration had laid low emphasis on dam safety. Out of a total of Rs 6.5 crore allocated towards an environment protection plan, the proponents designated only Rs 15 lakh, or 2.2%, towards disaster management.

Further, while the project’s disaster management plan, published as part of the environment impact assessment report, acknowledges that disasters on hydropower sites include “unexpected events due to sudden failure of the system” and earthquakes, it only lists responses the company has prepared to natural flash floods in the stream the project is built on.

The plan also states that as a precaution, dams should be equipped with “electronic gauge stations” – these stations monitor parameters such as water level and flow, and can thus ensure early detection of potential disasters. Apart from these stations, the dam was supposed to have “advance warning systems” at the intake sites, from where the hydropower project draws water from the river before transporting it to turbines, and at the power house, where water is used to run turbines to make electricity.

Such warning systems often comprise sirens that are sounded to alert the public in times of danger. But locals confirmed that there had been no warnings to alert residents downstream when water flooded in May.

A government official with knowledge of dams in Himachal Pradesh, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorised to speak to the media, explained that at Lambadug the gauge station and warning system had not been set up because the project had “not been commissioned yet, and was still in its trial phase”. In dam terminology, “commissioning” refers to the period after construction is complete and operation begins.

The statement however, contradicted a tweet dated February 24, 2024, by Megha Engineering, which stated that the Lambadug project had been commissioned and was operational.

Whether it was formally commissioned or not, early warning systems are crucial, activists said. “It is not necessary that such accidents would happen after the project completes construction,” said Bhim Rawat, associate coordinator with the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers, and People. “Time and again, we have seen disasters like flash floods or landslides occur while the project is being constructed.” He gave the example of the 2021 flash flood in Uttarakhand which, washed away part of the under-construction Tapovan Vishnugad project and left almost 200 people missing or dead. “The early warning systems should be installed during its construction phase to avoid threats originating upstream,” Rawat said.

In Multhan, most families, barring around five that Scroll learnt of, have received financial compensation for their losses from the company and the administration. However, they have had to sign an undertaking, which Scroll has seen, stating that their claim “has been settled”, and that “no claim” against the hydropower company would be made “in the future”. The undertaking also binds them to a commitment that all cases or first information reports pertaining to the matter will be withdrawn, and that they will “discharge” the company from all “obligations arising out of the damages caused due to leakage of water from the hydro power plant”. This undertaking is particularly significant given that on the day of the flood, residents had filed an FIR against the company alleging that it had used sub-standard construction material and failed to address earlier leaks.

Residents are frustrated that they were forced to sign the undertaking. “We faced the damages, and now they are putting conditions on us?” one resident said. He explained that they had raised the matter with the district collector but that it remained unresolved for now. He also noted that the document was in English, a language that few are fluent with in the region. “Not many residents were told what they were signing,” he said.

Other bodies also responsible

Himachal Pradesh formed the two state-level authorities that the Dam Safety Act mandated in May 2022 – the State Dam Safety Organisation and the State Committee on Dam Safety. But experts noted that these aren’t the only bodies that bear responsibility when it comes to monitoring the functioning of dams.

Asher explained, for instance, that the state’s pollution control board should have monitored muck disposal by the project to ensure that it adhered to guidelines. Locals, however, said that the company had disposed this muck on sites not designated to it. “We had taken the matter to the district collector many times and had requested them to do a geological and water survey of the dumping site, but so far no action had been taken,” a Multhan resident said. Because of this, when the flood happened, the water carried heavy loads of muck that “compounded the damage to people”, he added.

In fact, one resident of Multhan had filed a case pertaining to improper muck disposal against the KU Hydropower Project in the Kangra district court. In June 2023, the court ruled in the resident’s favour, stating that the company was “restrained” from throwing waste material over the resident’s private land. The court also ordered the company to increase the height of a wall at the dumping site to ensure that muck did not spill beyond its designated area.

Asher noted that if the state’s pollution control board “had checked for muck’s proper disposal, they would have found inconsistencies and issued a show-cause notice to the company.”

Lack of safety compliance and other accidents

From documentation gathered by Himdhara Collective and the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers, and People, and from online searches of media stories over the past ten years, Scroll found at least 14 cases of accidents at hydropower plants in Himachal Pradesh. Apart from immense damage to land, vegetation and property, these accidents also resulted in the loss of 35 lives.

Government reports and communications show that in earlier years too, many project proponents failed to adequately prepare for disasters.

A 2015 Comptroller and Auditor General report, for instance, that looked at 11 power stations across the country that had prepared disaster management plans, found that eight had not reviewed them annually, as they were required to do by the Disaster Management Act 2005. Four of these were from Himachal Pradesh.

Among the four was the 1500-MW Nathpa Jhakri dam in Kinnaur. While SJVN, the project proponent, responded to the CAG stating that their 2007 disaster management plan was reviewed in 2013, the report noted that the reviewed plan did not address several important matters. These included the strengthening of early warning systems, and strategy for coordination between the district administration, army and other hydro projects on the same river during monsoons to manage water levels. This was despite the fact that in 2000, after a flash flood hit the region, the Nathpa Jhakri dam was severely damaged, after which construction was set back by five years.

The same report also found that only one hydro project, Chamera I in Chamba, had carried out a dam break analysis – a simulation of how flood water will move in case a dam breaks. Such analyses can tell project proponents what areas will be impacted in case of dam failures, and what level of preparation is required to tackle the problem.

The CAG report also noted that for Nathpa Jhakri and Chamera II, no mock drills for flooding, bomb attacks or fire threats had been conducted in the past five years, and that the proponents made no provisions in their disaster management plans for training personnel to manage disasters.

This is surprising since just three years before the CAG report, Chamera II had faced a dam disaster – a massive leakage in the project’s head race tunnel occurred when the project was test running, and 40 families residing downstream had to be evacuated.

The government has also flagged the failure of project proponents to coordinate more closely with dam authorities during flash floods. As recently as 2022, the directorate of energy sent a letter to all project proponents and various dam officials, asking them to inform designated state-level dam safety officers when flash floods, sudden leakage, or heavy discharge around dams occurred. It indicated that it had made this request earlier, but that “despite the earlier communication sent in this regard, no response/information was shared”.

Asher pointed out that the continued problem of accidents at hydropower sites cannot be addressed merely through regulatory mechanisms like safety cells. Rather, she said, to minimise accidents, authorities would have to tackle the problem at the assessment stage, particularly for dams at challenging sites, “where topography is geographically dynamic, tectonically active, and the construction causes excavation and slope destabilisation”.

She noted, “The problem is not going to get resolved just by looking at safety post or during construction, but has to happen at a much earlier stage”. Rawat echoed this argument, noting that “structure-related accidents can be prevented by prior assessment, construction quality, and credible inspections by third parties”.