Snow Leopard

The moment people stand up for their land and rivers, someone calls them “anti-national.” Why? In Arunachal Pradesh, young people from the Adi community are protesting the proposed Siang Upper Multipurpose Project, an 11,200 MW mega dam on the Siang river. And almost instantly, sections of social media have branded them “Chinese-funded.” Think about how quickly that happened. Not a single question about why they’re worried. Just a label, and the conversation shut down. Asking what will happen to your village, your fields and your ancestor’s land isn’t treason. If there’s real evidence of foreign funding, investigate it. But using that suspicion to drown out every local voice is not patriotism. It’s convenience. The government does have a case. A dam of this size could produce huge amounts of power, help with energy security and, with storage, regulate river flows. And there’s a strategic angle that can’t be ignored. China has started building what will be the world’s largest hydropower project on the Yarlung Tsangpo, the same river that becomes the Siang when it enters India. But the other side matters just as much. The Siang flows through one of the most earthquake-prone places on earth, in seismic zone V. In 1950, the region was hit by one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded, the magnitude 8.6 Assam-Tibet quake, which changed river courses and triggered massive landslides. Building a giant reservoir here raises serious questions about earthquakes, landslides, slope stability, silt and what happens downstream if something goes wrong. These need independent, rigorous study, not just assurances. And for the Adi people, the Siang isn’t a resource to be calculated in megawatts. It’s their identity, their culture, their history. The reservoir could submerge villages that families have lived in for generations. We in Uttarakhand know this story well, because we’ve lived it. Sunderlal Bahuguna and thousands of others spent years protesting the Tehri dam, warning about earthquakes and the people who would be displaced. The old town of Tehri, with its history, its bazaar and its homes, now lies under water. Tens of thousands of families were uprooted. On the Bhagirathi, projects like Lohari Nagpala were finally scrapped after long protests, including the fast by environmentalist GD Agrawal, who later died fasting for the Ganga in 2018. The proposed Pancheshwar dam on the Mahakali, in a highly seismic part of Kumaon, has faced strong opposition from villagers who fear their valleys will be drowned. After the 2013 Kedarnath disaster, an expert committee set up on the Supreme Court’s orders found that hydropower projects had worsened the damage in the river valleys. In February 2021, a flood of rock, ice and debris tore through the Rishiganga and Dhauliganga valleys in Chamoli, destroying the Rishiganga project and badly damaging the Tapovan-Vishnugad project. Around 200 people were killed or went missing, many of them workers inside the tunnels. Years before that, villagers of Raini, the same village where Gaura Devi led the Chipko movement, had gone to court against the Rishiganga project. And when Joshimath began to sink in 2023, residents and activists, led by Atul Sati and the Joshimath Bachao Sangharsh Samiti, pointed to the NTPC project tunnel beneath the town and demanded answers. Each time, people who raised questions were called “anti-development.” Each time, the mountains eventually proved them right. Hydropower isn’t evil. It has real benefits. But it isn’t automatically “clean” either, especially in the young, fragile Himalaya, where one mistake can cost thousands of lives. India’s worries about China are legitimate. So are the worries of the people who live along the Siang. A country confident in its plans should be able to answer questions about them. And loving your country should never mean staying silent about the future of your own land.