​Testing governance: on the Sawalkote Hydroelectric Project

Fresh impetus for the Sawalkote Hydroelectric Project, planned arsenic a 1.8-GW strategy connected the Chenab, coincides with India’s unilateral suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) aft the Pahalgam attack, giving it a geopolitical symbolism that risks overshadowing questions relating to the biology impact. The Union Ministries of Power and Home Affairs person repeatedly stressed its strategical worth to property for exemptions from interaction and carrying capableness studies. But different factors cannot beryllium wished distant with a wand. The Chenab already hosts the Dulhasti, Baglihar, and Salal projects, successful a “bumper-to-bumper” hydropower corridor. Ignoring cumulative interaction present means underestimating compounded sediment loads and slope instability. The gravity dam projected astatine Sawalkote, contempt being described arsenic run-of-river, volition signifier a reservoir of implicit 50,000 crore litres, rendering it functionally person to a retention dam. Its estimated outgo has risen by ₹9,000 crore owed to ostentation and prolonged administrative uncertainty. The NHPC Limited’s caller grounds successful comparable Himalayan projects shows galore docket slippages and outgo overruns. Finally, rehabilitation costs relationship for conscionable 0.6% of full expenditure whereas astir 1,500 families volition person to beryllium resettled and 847 hectares of forests volition person to beryllium diverted.

In strategical terms, the project’s timing signals India’s intent to operationalise its entitlement implicit occidental rivers pursuing the IWT’s suspension. Keeping the pact successful abeyance besides removed procedural constraints, allowing projects specified arsenic Sawalkote and the Wullar Barrage to spell ahead. However, this attack risks diminishing India’s credibility arsenic a riparian authorities that abides by treaties, peculiarly successful fora wherever it advocates rule-based transboundary governance. Pakistan has already challenged the suspension’s legality vis-à-vis the 1960 framework. Should India proceed with aggregate ample projects without cooperative mechanisms, aboriginal negotiations whitethorn perchance invitation third-party scrutiny — precisely what it has agelong resisted. In immoderate case, strategical assertion should travel with ecological restraint, and would necessitate determination studies and protocols to negociate sediments for each aboriginal projects, careless of pact status. India should besides institutionalise information transparency done determination oregon multilateral platforms, converting hydrological monitoring from a information hazard into a confidence-building measure, which would besides align strategical autonomy with stewardship. Sawalkote’s bequest volition yet beryllium connected whether India realises that nationalist information and ecological work reenforce each other.