Suicidal for Nepal
Barah Chhetra is a Hindu pilgrimage site.
Indian minister for Water Resources Pawan Kumar Banshal forwarded this proposal at a press-conference held in Kathmandu on Sunday, July 12, 2009 prior to winding up his two day brief
The Indian minister was in
“The long-term solution to control floods in the area is to construct the high damâ€, said Banshal.
“I have invited my Nepali counterpart to hold discussions over this issue in
An already rejected proposal while King Mahendra was Head of the State and B.P. Koirala as the government head, the Indian government has once again, after a span of five decades, forwarded the same proposal notably after republican order established in the country.
King Mahendra after the site visit then had out rightly rejected the proposal saying that the project was neither in the larger interest of the local population nor that of the country , say
Amid much hue and cry from the local population, that the local environment would be adversely affected by the construction of the mega-project, the then Maoists’ led government had allowed the Indian technicians to carry out their feasibility studies in the area only recently.
During his visit to
“Sapta Koshi High Dam is a project that is not in
“Officials of the Nepali establishment are deeply caught up in
Survey expert Buddhi Narayan Shrestha opines that if the Koshi High Dam were to be built at Baraha Chhetra as per Indian insistence, the valleys and villages upstream of the dam in Dhankuta, Bhojpur and Terahthum would be submerged into waters.
“There is also no guarantee that this dam will prevent further devastation in
Analysts claim that the Indian minister was here not to watch the Koshi river damage but to “seduce†or even coerce the Nepali minister Mr. Khand to toe his line.
High placed sources in Kathmandu say that the
‘It is a suicidal project for
Similarly, Dipak Gyawali, a former Minister of Water Resources is very much concerned over the technology used to construct the high dam over Koshi.
In an interview published few months back in the Kathmandu Post, Gyawali had claimed that the construction would take two or three decades, which thus will fail to address problems of current and immediate future concerns.
“It is extremely expensive, does not address the primary problem of sedimentation (the reservoir will fill up too soon with Himalayan muck), has no convincing answer regarding the cost of attending to high seismicity in the region as well as diversion of peak instantaneous flood during construction (it is a major engineering challenge with no easy solution), and will create more social problems when indigenous population in Nepal have to be evicted from their ancestral homesâ€.
A Koshi high dam would tantamount to
“I think neither