Climate-change sensitive knowledge-gathering for Himalayan rivers is vital
Renowned water resources expert Professor Ajaya Dixit talks about why the climate crisis is the only lens through which we must view the Himalayas
The flooding in Sikkim, which has left 22 dead and over 100 missing — as per the latest count, the numbers are still rising — has made it clear the price we pay for development at the cost of the environment. Kathmandu-based Ajaya Dixit, a Professor of Practice at the Kathmandu School of Law and an internationally renowned expert on water resources, argues for an overhaul in knowledge collection about the Himalayan river system — one which must take into account the very real consequences of climate change — before creating any further infrastructure for the residents of the region.
Dixit is the author and editor of a number of books and papers on floods and water resource management including Flood Problems and Management in South Asia (2003) and Kosi Embankment Breach in Nepal (2009). Read edited excerpts of the interview:
The recent flood in Sikkim, bigger than the 2013 floods in Uttarakhand and 2022 in Himachal Pradesh, has wreaked massive damage to infrastructure, including washing away the state's largest dam, the Chungthang, not to mention the human casualties. Was this avoidable?
Immediate post-event assessment will always suffer from hindsight wisdom, which is 20:20. The risk of potential GLOF (glacial lake outburst flood) due to the breach of the Lhonak Lake has already been highlighted in academic and other writings. Unfortunately, the warnings went unheeded. Even more surprising is the absence of sharing of GLOF mitigation actions in the Himalayan region and downstream.
In our thinking, the Himalayan range has been compartmentalised as eastern, western and central, with eastern and western Himalaya in India and central Himalayas in Nepal. In the past, Nepal has faced many GLOFs that have damaged infrastructures, and played havoc with people’s lives, their assets, and river geomorphology.
At the least in Nepal, we have learned and implemented a number of GLOF mitigation projects. Two specific examples are the Tso Rolpa Lake (2000) and Imja Lake mitigation (2016). In both cases, spillways were built in the moraine to lower water levels of the glacial lakes and minimise the risk of a GLOF. (It) seems to me at a more pragmatic level, such practices have not been shared. Very few regional collaborative efforts examine the implications of such catastrophic events for lessons. The recent Sikkim disaster, despite the ferocity of its flow and partial devastation of the state’s 1200 MW hydropower project, had fewer human casualties compared to the 2013 Kedarnath floods: Official estimates put the number of people dead in the disaster at 4,000, while unofficial estimates put the number at 20,000. Thousands of pilgrims visiting the shrine were exposed to the hazard.
There have been some studies of the Himalayan rivers, their annual discharge patterns and to some extent the development patterns too. What are the major takeaways so that we avoid such catastrophes?
I would argue that we have not invested sufficiently in understanding the characteristics of Himalayan rivers for their multiple values and benefits. Our focus has mostly been on deriving commercial benefits at the cost of ecological and other values. In the late 1980s, ‘90s and the early decade of the new millennium, scholars and analysts of the region representing engineering, economics, hydrology, political science, gender studies, etc., worked in partnerships to examine nuances of water management and, within it, the stewarding of the Himalayan rivers as useful efforts in nudging the knowledge stream to the next level.
Unfortunately, in the last many years, dialogues and conversations across political, regional and disciplinary boundaries have been limited even while the complexity of the Himalayan region has increased with climate change. The imperatives for sustainable development will greatly benefit from dialogues in which constructive critical, and some very uncomfortable questions are asked, answers sought and used iteratively for practices, policies and principles.
Could you explain the impact of global warming on the Himalayan rivers and infrastructure like major hydel projects?
The Himalayan region is seismically active — there have been several devastating tremors, from the 1934 Bihar-Nepal earthquake to the 2015 Gorkha earthquake immediately come to mind. Recently, on October 3, Bajhang in west Nepal, not very far from Uttarakhand, faced a tremor of 6.2 magnitude that was felt as far as New Delhi. Today, the rate of warming in the high mountains, the Himalayas, is higher than that of the mid-hills and the plains. In the months of summer, the plains are already reeling from the impact of increased temperatures and humidity. The 2022 summer is the most recent example.
Under the business-as-usual scenario of greenhouse emission, the temperature and humidity combined are likely to rise and this will put stress on the way we adapt to heat, design our shelters, cities, energy supply and, as a result, governance. In addition, the region already faces extreme rainfall events in monsoon and droughts, which threaten agriculture, people and the infrastructure we built.
One of Nepal's largest river systems, the Kosi, flows from eastern Nepal to India, and is also known as “Sorrow of Bihar”. Have policymakers in Kathmandu, Patna and Delhi learned what experts and farmers on the ground have been trying to convey to them in the last 70 years?
The Kosi, a major tributary of the Ganga, is one of the world’s most turbulent rivers, which has the highest sediment-transport rate. In the last 220 years, the river in the plains has moved 115 km westward. Colonial engineers gave the river the sobriquet of “Sorrow of Bihar”. In 1954, Nepal and India signed a treaty on the Kosi to control its wayward movement and flooding. Along the two sides of the river, embankments have been built that extend from Nepal to its confluence with the Ganga.
So far, the embankments have been breached eight times. The most devastating one was in 2008 when the eastern Kosi embankment at Kusha in Nepal was breached. The entire Kosi river began flowing through the breach along its old courses, affecting a massive number of people in the Terai plains — 50,000 in Nepal and 3.5 million in Bihar. The Kosi project is an example of the deployment of embankment in a hydrologically sensitive and sediment-laden river. The riverbed is higher than the banks and remains a potential threat. Still, the lessons are constantly ignored.
The current catastrophe in the eastern Himalayas demonstrates the extreme difficulty of civil engineering in the fragile ecosystem, further endangered during the monsoon. How do you look at the Himalayan rivers, their river basins and the development projects in the region?
On the one hand, political boundaries are a reality when it comes to project management. On the other, climate change, environmental disruptions and rivers have their own course. At the very least, in academia and knowledge production, we need to consider the Himalayan region as a mosaic consisting of snow-capped mountains, hills, valleys, and plains from east to west — from Arunachal, Bhutan, Sikkim in the east; Nepal in the central region; and northwestern India and northern Pakistan in the west.
Also, there is a strong interconnection between upstream and downstream — Himanchal Pradesh-Punjab, Uttarakhand-Uttar Pradesh, Nepal-Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Sikkim-West Bengal and Bangladesh, also Bhutan and Assam. Upstream disruptions cascade into downstream, crossing social and institutional boundaries.
So, the region as a whole needs to be understood in the context of climate change in the Himalayas?
The region has four major specificities. First, they are geologically fragile, unlike mountain systems such as the Alps and the Rockies. Second, they are fed by the monsoon system; third, the westerlies – the two systems combined give the region a unique hydrological character, different from those in Europe and North America. Fourth, the river regions house diverse natural ecological systems whose services are basic to the life and livelihood of the region’s millions of people manifested by their social and economic diversities.
Yet our development pathway in the mountain region has been guided by a model evolved elsewhere: large-scale infrastructure such as hydel dams, river corridors, and concretised urban scape in the mountains, contradicting the context. It doesn’t quite resonate with the existing and emerging complexity. Clearly, civil engineering, as currently practised as in our region, is crying for re-imagination.
I think dam-building activities in our region do take into consideration seismic forces. Project designers do include sufficient safety factors in considering ground acceleration caused by seismic tremors. This consideration has cost implications, of course.
Hydrological impropriety, however, remains a challenge. The design, construction and management of water infrastructure overlook the role and extreme events. Indeed, at academic levels, these limitations have been discussed, and analysed, but the learnings have not been internalised in standard operating procedures. Could the Sikkim and Uttarakhand disasters have been avoided? Perhaps. We need a new matrix and techniques for properly dealing with rivers and the waterscape. These must be part of our new imagining of the Himalayan region's development and water stewardship.
Akhilesh Upadhyay is a former editor of the Kathmandu Post, and a Senior Fellow at IIDS, a Kathmandu-based think tank.
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