Source: www.bloomberg.com
INDIA, May 4, 2010: Avimukteshwaranand Saraswati stands on the banks of the Ganges, India’s holiest river, urging his fellow Hindu priests to oppose hydropower dams the nation needs to curb blackouts and drive economic growth. “Without electricity, you can survive. One can’t survive without water,” Saraswati tells a gathering of holy men in the Himalayan foothills where the Kumbha Mela, a Hindu festival that draws more than 50 million devotees, is entering its final days. “You cannot shackle the Ganges and call it development.”
Opposition from Hindu groups helped halt two dams on tributaries of the Ganges in March and the government this month is set to decide whether to complete a barrage that’s part of a plan to add 15,600 megawatts of hydropower by 2012. The energy shortfall forces manufacturers including Tata Motors Ltd. and Bajaj Auto Ltd., Nissan Motor Co.’s Indian partner, to rely on back-up generators to build cars and bikes. “The power situation in India is a disaster,” said Pradeep Shrivastava, president of engineering at Pune-based Bajaj, which operates a motorbike factory in northern Uttarakhand state where the Ganges flows onto the Indian plains. “We are dependent on our internal generation.”
The river also helps irrigate India’s largest wheat and second-biggest sugar producing state, Uttar Pradesh, while West Bengal, the last province before the Ganges flows into its delta in Bangladesh, is the nation’s No. 1 rice grower. The World Bank forecasts that demand for water in India will exceed available sources by 2050.
The two dams in Uttarakhand, 125 miles from New Delhi, were scrapped on March 25 out of what Jairam Ramesh, the environment minister, said was “respect for sentiments of faith and culture” and possible ecological damage as the river level falls. There’s a new sensitivity in government to dams’ “environmental impact, and displacement and rehabilitation of people,” said Ashok Jaitly, director of the water resources division at New Delhi-based The Energy Resources Institute, which researches issues of sustainable development.
“If you want to have a manufacturing base you need surplus power,” said V. Balakrishnan, chief financial officer of Infosys Technologies Ltd., India’s second-largest software exporter.