Uttara Kannada, one of India’s most forested districts and part of the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot, is facing growing pressure from hydropower, pumped storage, nuclear expansion, ports and river diversion projects.
The proposed Sharavathi Pumped Storage Project is located in the same forest landscape around the Gerusoppa dam, where earlier hydropower development triggered major public opposition.
The project raises legal and ecological concerns because the area is now part of the Sharavathi Valley Lion-Tailed Macaque Wildlife Sanctuary and its eco-sensitive zone.
India’s low-carbon transition must not weaken the forests, rivers, carbon sinks and communities that are central to climate resilience & reversing the biodiversity loss.
India has made ambitious pledges to the world: to reach net zero by 2070 and to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. In one forest district of Karnataka, these commitments are colliding.
Ironically, the very infrastructure being built to achieve India's clean energy transition and net-zero goals is fragmenting forests that store carbon, harbour extraordinary biodiversity, and sustain the rivers, thereby accelerating biodiversity loss.
Uttara Kannada, part of the globally significant Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot, is among India’s most ecologically important districts, with nearly 80 per cent forest cover. Sustained by intense monsoon rainfall, its evergreen and moist deciduous forests, rivers and estuaries support tigers, leopards, lion-tailed macaques, great hornbills and thousands of other species, many of them still undocumented.
This biodiversity is protected not only by the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, but also by the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. The district contains a dense network of protected landscapes, including Kali Tiger Reserve, Anshi National Park, Sharavathi Valley Lion-Tailed Macaque Wildlife Sanctuary and Karnataka’s only marine protected area, the Apsarakonda-Mugali Marine Sanctuary. It also includes the Aghanashini Estuary, a designated Ramsar site.
Yet overlaying this network of forests and protected areas is an equally significant concentration of energy infrastructure. As the map, Energy Geography of Uttara Kannada, shows, the district plays a critical role in Karnataka’s power supply through a cascade of hydropower dams. It also contributes to the national grid through the Kaiga Nuclear Power Station.
From the 1970s to the turn of the century, Uttara Kannada witnessed a wave of large dams, powerhouses, tunnels and transmission lines. Vast stretches of evergreen forest were submerged for reservoirs and cleared for transmission corridors. Species may have disappeared before they were even documented. Once free-flowing rivers were pushed through tunnels, while regulated hydropower flows permanently altered the estuarine ecology of the Kali and Sharavathi rivers.
Much of this expansion was strongly opposed by local communities on environmental grounds. For them, the ecological integrity of these landscapes was deeply tied to livelihoods, culture and local economies. As projects advanced despite these concerns, vulnerabilities for farmers and fishing communities intensified, and existing social and economic inequalities deepened.
One of the earliest dam projects to face sustained public opposition was the Bedthi Hydel Project. Work began in 1977, but widespread resistance from local communities eventually forced the government to halt the scheme. A similar story unfolded with the proposed Aghanashini Hydel Project. If the Bedthi and Aghanashini rivers remain free-flowing today, it is not by accident, but because of the sustained struggles of the people of Uttara Kannada.
But not all hydel projects that faced public opposition met the same fate, as the dense network of operational dams across the Kali and Sharavathi basins makes clear. The Gerusoppa Hydroelectric Project is a revealing example of how such projects proceeded despite massive official misinformation and intense public resistance.
Today, the proposed Sharavathi Pumped Storage Project, located in the same forest landscape around the Gerusoppa dam, appears in many ways to be repeating that history.
Conceived in the 1960s and pushed aggressively by the state in the 1980s, the Gerusoppa Hydroelectric Project triggered a large environmental movement in Uttara Kannada. Environmental groups, fishers, local communities, scientists, writers and religious leaders mobilised against the submergence of nearly 700 hectares of evergreen Western Ghats forest in the Sharavathi valley.
In an interview published in The Times of India on 14 August 1990, then Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Maneka Gandhi recounted that the area proposed for submergence by the Gerusoppa Dam had been described by officials as "barren" land, which later turned out to be dense rainforest. This shows how crucial pieces of information are left out to obtain forest clearance.
The project received forest clearance in 1986 under the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980. It became widely known only after construction and tree felling began in 1987, triggering large protests.
Although the resistance was often described as ‘environmental’, it was equally rooted in livelihood concerns. Alongside the destruction of endemic flora and fauna, including habitat of the endangered lion-tailed macaque, rural communities faced the loss of forests they depended on for livelihoods, fuelwood, medicines and cultural practices. Local people also feared the spread of Kyasanur Forest Disease, a tick-borne illness linked to forest disturbance.
In 1988, a public interest group secured an order from the Honnavar district court to stop the project, but work continued. The group then approached the Karnataka High Court and secured a stay in 1991. The Ministry of Environment and Forests withdrew clearances in 1992, only to reissue them with conditions the following year.
By then, the World Bank, having disbursed about $24 million from an approved $260 million loan, cancelled the remaining loan. It cited prolonged delays due to public opposition, court proceedings, the withdrawal of environmental clearance by the government, and non-compliance with key covenants by the Karnataka government.
Despite all this, the project went ahead. It was commissioned only in 2000, instead of 1996, with major cost escalation.
Today, public resistance to the Sharavathi Pumped Storage Project is unfolding in the same forest landscape, around the same Gerusoppa dam, and for many of the same reasons — though in a very different world.
We now live on a destabilised planet, where economies are rapidly decarbonising to mitigate climate change. Like many countries, India is expanding low-carbon energy sources such as solar, wind, hydropower, pumped storage and nuclear power. At the same time, the world faces another planetary crisis: the ongoing sixth mass extinction. India has committed to halting and reversing biodiversity loss under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
The environmental regulatory landscape has also changed significantly over the past two and a half decades. Environmental decision-making is now guided by instruments such as the EIA Notification, 2006, while the National Green Tribunal provides a specialised forum for environmental adjudication.
Most importantly, the evergreen forest landscape around the Gerusoppa dam and reservoir, where the Sharavathi pumped storage project is proposed, now has legal protections that did not exist during the Gerusoppa controversy.
Recognising the precarious status of the lion-tailed macaque and the ecological significance of its habitat, the Karnataka government notified the area as the Sharavathi Valley Lion-Tailed Macaque Wildlife Sanctuary in 2019 under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. As a result, Section 29 of the Act applies, prohibiting the destruction, exploitation or diversion of wildlife habitat within the sanctuary. This makes the siting of the Sharavathi project legally questionable.
The area around the sanctuary is also protected through an Eco-Sensitive Zone notification. This explicitly prohibits the siting of hydropower projects, again raising serious legal concerns over the project.
Beyond this, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has issued draft Ecologically Sensitive Area notifications for the Western Ghats. These subject hydropower projects in the landscape to environmental assessment under the EIA Notification, 2006, ecological flow requirements, cumulative impact assessments and limits on dam and hydropower density within a river basin.
This broader policy framework is reinforced by the Ministry's 2018 Expert Committee Report on the Carrying Capacity of Ecologically Sensitive Areas (ESAs) in Karnataka's Western Ghats, which recommended safeguarding the remaining free-flowing rivers and estuaries of Uttara Kannada from the ecological impacts of further large-scale development projects.
Taken together, these protections raise a basic question: if the law recognises this landscape as ecologically fragile and prohibits infrastructure that is not in the interest of wildlife, why is the Sharavathi Pumped Storage Project being pursued here?
Despite legal concerns and sustained citizen opposition, the Karnataka Government, through its executing agency, the Karnataka Power Corporation Limited (KPCL), pressed ahead with the project while leaving out crucial pieces of information from the proposal. In its earlier submissions, the project proponent did not even disclose that the project was located within the Sharavathi Lion-Tailed Macaque Wildlife Sanctuary.
Citizens took the fight from the streets to the courts, first in 2020 and again in 2026.
In 2020, the corporation obtained wildlife clearance to undertake geotechnical investigations inside the sanctuary. The clearance was challenged before the Karnataka High Court, which stayed the project. By then, however, the corporation had largely completed the investigations and wound up its operations.
The agency later initiated the process of obtaining wildlife, forest and environmental clearances in 2023. Wildlife clearance was granted in July 2025. Around the same time, in September 2025, the mandatory public hearing under the environmental clearance process was held. Thousands attended the hearing amid heavy police security.
As public opposition intensified, the wildlife clearance was not placed in the public domain through the PARIVESH portal, as required. When citizens became aware of the clearance several months later, they challenged it before the Karnataka High Court. On March 10, 2026, the court ordered that no work on the project be carried out until further orders.
At the latest hearing on July 10, the Additional Solicitor General, appearing for the Union Government, placed on record the MoEFCC's March 2026 site inspection report, which recommends that the proposed Sharavathi Pumped Storage Project should not be sited within the dense rainforest of the legally protected Wildlife Sanctuary. The report identifies several critical omissions in the proposal and concludes that the proposal lacks technical merit and is not in the public interest.
The Court granted KPCL time to file its response. The matter is now listed for hearing on 1 October, with the interim stay continuing until then.While the Union Government's submission appeared to offer hope that the project might not move forward, that optimism proved to be short-lived. Just days after the hearing, a new report prepared by the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, for KPCL surfaced.
The report not only recommends approval of the Sharavathi Pumped Storage Project but also makes the outrageous recommendation that the existing legal framework be amended to facilitate its implementation. Although KPCL had this report at the time of the hearing, it chose not to place it before the Court.
The Sharavathi pumped storage project is not the only threat to Uttara Kannada’s forests. It is the newest expression of a much wider pressure.
As the map shows, the district is under stress from the Kaiga nuclear power expansion, sugarcane-based fuel ethanol production, a coal-based thermal power plant, a combined-cycle gas power plant and proposed port projects designed to move coal inland, in addition to existing infrastructure.
Some projects, such as the 450 MW Hankon coal-based thermal power plant and the 2,100 MW Tadadi power plant, have remained stalled because of public opposition. The Kaiga nuclear expansion, from 880 MW to 1,400 MW, is proceeding despite public resistance and a challenge to its environmental clearance before the National Green Tribunal.
The Karnataka Maritime Board has proposed, and is seeking clearances for, a series of ports in addition to the existing Karwar port. These are intended to import coal, coking coal, iron ore and dolomite — key energy and industrial inputs for power plants and steel mills in central and north Karnataka, including the Ballari-Hosapete belt, as well as Telangana and southern Maharashtra.
These port proposals have triggered serious conflict with fishing communities, who say they are losing homes and traditional fishing grounds while facing heavy-handed policing.
Even before the proposed ports emerged as an existential threat, coastal and estuarine fishers had long borne the consequences of upstream river diversions for hydropower, nuclear power and agriculture. The latest diversion takes water from the Kali river near Dandeli to support sugarcane cultivation in Haliyal, feeding the industrial fuel ethanol economy.
The proposed Bedthi-Varada and Aghanashini-Vedavathi diversion projects, strongly opposed by people in Uttara Kannada, would further reduce river flows and increase the vulnerability of fishing communities.
Without basin-level assessments of available water and existing users, river water is diverted from one use to another, often at the expense of river-dependent communities and the ecological integrity of the rivers themselves. Like climate change and biodiversity loss, disruption of the freshwater cycle has already crossed a planetary boundary, placing humanity outside Earth’s safe operating space.
It is not only biodiversity and water that are under threat. Carbon is at stake too.
The Western Ghats region, of which Uttara Kannada is a part, stores an estimated 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon in biomass and soil, making it one of India’s largest natural carbon vaults. Beyond this existing stock, the Western Ghats sequester about 37.5 million tonnes of carbon annually.
The degradation and fragmentation of these forests risk turning carbon sinks into carbon sources, undermining the goals of climate mitigation itself.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the green transition in Uttara Kannada. The very tools being used to fight climate change — dams, reservoirs, transmission corridors, nuclear power and now pumped storage — are accelerating biodiversity loss while weakening the carbon sinks needed to stabilise the climate.
The green transition, as it is unfolding here, is not breaking from the destructive patterns of the past. It is repeating them.
The challenge is not merely to build low-carbon energy infrastructure. It is to do so without further eroding biodiversity, turning carbon sinks into carbon sources, exploiting already scarce water resources or deepening social inequalities.
Nirmala Gowda is activist-researcher, Mapping Malnad. Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth