Bhagat Singh Kinnar has spent more than a decade running between courtrooms, gram sabha halls, and government offices in Kinnaur district. He and the residents of Rarang village are fighting to stop the Kashang Integrated Hydroelectric Project from diverting the water they drink, irrigate with, and depend on for survival. “People have been shouting and screaming, running to the courts and holding protests,” he told researchers, “But this has had no impact.” The Himachal Pradesh Power Corporation Limited, which is building the project, never obtained a no-objection certificate from the gram sabha — a legal requirement under the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act in this Schedule V tribal district. The project continues anyway.
Kinnaur is not an exception. It is the template.
Himachal Pradesh is India’s self-declared “power state.” With five major river systems — the Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, Chenab, and Yamuna — cutting through its steep Himalayan terrain, the state holds approximately 25 per cent of India’s total assessed hydropower potential of 27,436 MW. As of mid-2025, 29 large hydroelectric projects alone account for an installed capacity of over 10,281 MW, with more under construction and hundreds more in various stages of clearance. The state earns substantial revenue by selling power to other states, and successive governments have treated river water as the most reliable source of fiscal survival. But what looks like a development success story from the revenue ledger looks very different from the riverbank.
The Sutlej tells that story most starkly. A 2021 cumulative impact assessment found that 142 hydropower projects totalling 10,031 MW are either commissioned, under construction, or planned on this river alone. As a result, 92 per cent of the river will either flow through tunnels or sit inside reservoirs. The river does not disappear on paper — it simply gets redirected underground, past turbines, and returned downstream as a weakened shadow of itself. In July 2025, the Supreme Court said precisely this. A bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and R Mahadevan observed that project developers are not maintaining the minimum contractually mandated outflow of water, resulting in the vanishing of aquatic life. “In fact, the mighty trans-Himalayan River Sutlej stands reduced to a rivulet,” the court stated, while converting the matter into a suo motu public interest litigation.
State policy mandates that a minimum of 20 per cent of average annual flow be maintained for ecological sustenance in river stretches affected by hydropower projects, in line with National Green Tribunal directives and the 2017 environmental flow framework. That norm exists on paper. On the ground, it is routinely violated. The Supreme Court’s observation is not a judicial overreach — it confirms what communities, researchers, and civil society organisations have documented for years.
Run-of-river projects carry a reputation for environmental benignity. Planners prefer them over large storage dams precisely because they divert rather than impound. But the distinction evaporates when you stack dozens of run-of-river projects in a single river basin. A study on run-of-river projects in the Beas basin found that for every megawatt of power generated, small hydropower projects diverted 0.267 km of river reach, compared to 0.033 km for large projects — meaning the proliferation of small and medium projects creates far greater cumulative disruption per unit of energy produced. The diversion of river water into tunnels reduces surface flow, drains springs, and cuts off the groundwater recharge that feeds the traditional irrigation channels — the kuhls — that mountain communities have managed for generations. When a kuhl runs dry, an orchard dies. When an orchard dies, a family in Kinnaur loses its primary livelihood.
The construction process compounds the damage. Tunnel blasting in geologically fragile terrain — 97.42 per cent of Himachal Pradesh is landslide-prone according to the Geological Survey of India — destabilises slopes, cracks foundations, and triggers rockfalls that damage homes, fields, and roads. The Bajoli-Holi project in Chamba caused seepage and landslides damaging local homes as early as 2012. The 2021 Kinnaur monsoon, which saw communities lose lives in landslides near Batseri and Neugal Sari, catalysed the region’s strongest resistance movement yet. Villagers drew a direct line between the blasting from project tunnels and the slope failures that buried their neighbours. The state government never conducted an independent investigation to confirm or refute the connection.
What turns this from an environmental problem into a political one is the structure of governance around water itself. Himachal Pradesh passed the Water Cess on Hydropower Generation Act in 2023 to claim a share of revenue from the water its rivers carry. The Himachal Pradesh High Court struck the act down in March 2024, ruling that the state lacks legislative competence to levy such a cess under the Constitution’s division of powers. The river belongs geographically to Himachal Pradesh, but fiscally and legally the state cannot define the terms of its own water’s use. Meanwhile, the Shanan hydropower plant — a 110 MW British-era project using the waters of the Uhl, a Beas tributary — continues to generate over Rs 100 crore in annual revenue for Punjab, which was allocated the plant during state reorganisation in 1966. Himachal Pradesh, which provides the water and bears the ecological cost, collects none of it. The water is the resource, and the state that hosts it holds the least power over its returns.
This is not a temporary administrative friction. It reflects a structural condition in which Himalayan hill states provide ecological services — watershed maintenance, river flows, groundwater recharge — that benefit downstream plains populations and national energy grids, while absorbing the costs of construction, displacement, and environmental degradation without adequate compensation. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 and the PESA Act give tribal communities in Schedule V areas explicit rights over their natural resources and a mandatory role in consent processes. In practice, developers bypass gram sabhas by reclassifying hydro projects under renewable energy exemptions, a legal sleight of hand the state government has actively enabled.
The Supreme Court’s ongoing PIL offers a rare institutional opening. The court has already directed the Himachal Pradesh government and forest department to submit a comprehensive ecological action plan, and has asked pointed questions about the cumulative impact of projects on river basins and communities. But judicial oversight alone cannot reorient a development model built over three decades. What is needed is a mandatory, independent cumulative impact assessment for each river basin before any new project is cleared — not basin-by-basin assessments commissioned by the developers themselves, but publicly accessible, peer-reviewed analyses conducted before project allotment. Ecological flow norms need teeth, which means real-time monitoring systems, transparent public data, and financial penalties that actually exceed the cost of non-compliance.
The mountain river is not a political weapon by nature. It becomes one when governance treats water as revenue to be extracted and rivers as infrastructure to be rerouted. The communities of Kinnaur, Kullu, Mandi, and Chamba do not oppose energy. They oppose the transfer of ecological risk downward — onto their fields, their springs, and their children’s futures — while the financial returns flow elsewhere. Until that asymmetry changes, the hydropower boom will keep building power for the plains on a foundation of dispossession in the hills.
Ankit Mishra is an ICSSR Doctoral Fellow and Research Scholar at G.B. Pant Social Science Institute, Prayagraj, where his work focuses on environmental politics, climate change, and public policy and governance.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth