Tapovan Vishnugad: NTPC project at the heart of Joshimath crisis HIMANSHU THAKKAR
Jan 26, 2023
https://frontline.thehindu.com/environment/tapovan-vishnugad-hydropower-plant-ntpc-project-at-the-heart-of-joshimath-crisis/article66386447.ece NTPC is trying its best to wash its hands of any involvement in the sinking and collapse of hundreds of buildings, roads, and the temple in Joshimath.
The letter written by the Secretary, Union Ministry of Power, to the Chief Secretary of Uttarakhand on January 11, “Construction of the tunnel in this stretch has been done through Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) which causes no disturbance to the surrounding rock mass.”
The reality is that of the 13.22 kilometres of Head Race Tunnel (HRT, including 966 metres upstream of intake), about 4.95 km is being constructed by the Drill and Blasting method. At no stage has NTPC made public how many times it has used blasting for the tunnel and other project-related work, at what locations, on what days, and in what quantities.
The warnings have been there since 1886, when Edwin T. Atkinson indicated in The Himalayan Gazetteer that the town was located on landslide debris. The 1976 Mishra Committee report also warned of the limited load-bearing capacity of slopes. In 2009, when the Tapovan Vishnugad Hydropower project’s tunnel boring machine on Dhauliganga river punctured an aquifer near Selang (this village, close to the tunnel, is facing cracks and subsidence), it led to a daily discharge of millions of litres of water for several weeks. Scientists had warned then that this could lead to subsidence.
The 2013 Kedarnath disaster was another wake-up call, followed by several others, the latest being the flash floods of February 2021. Most of the 200 deaths in 2021 were at the construction site of the Tapovan Vishnugad project. The erosion of a part of the left bank of Alaknanda river just downstream of Joshimath that followed the floods of February and October 2021 are now being discussed. The cracks in Joshimath aggravated in the last week of December 2022, but they took a quantum leap on the night of January 2, 2023, when muddy water suddenly started gushing out from underground at the rate of about 400 litres per minute in the Marwari area of Joshimath town.
The Minister of Earth Sciences is setting up micro seismic observatories around Joshimath. It sounds eerily similar to NTPC declaring after the February 2021 disaster that they would now put up early warning systems upstream—something they should have done earlier, saving lives.