No Holding Back

All the while that India and Pakistan were putting across their cases on the Baglihar hydel project to the World Bank neutral expert Raymond Lafitte, the engineers at the dam site in Doda were quietly doing as much as was possible under the circumstances.

All the while that India and Pakistan were putting across their cases on the Baglihar hydel project to the World Bank neutral expert Raymond Lafitte, the engineers at the dam site in Doda were quietly doing as much as was possible under the circumstances. So when Lafitte8217;s decision was announced last week8212;clearing the project with some manageable changes8212;it wasn8217;t a time to pause and celebrate for the engineers and workers putting up the 450 MW project on the Chenab. If anything, it meant that work had to restart in earnest.

By their own reckoning, February is a month of emergency at Baglihar. The dam is close to 80 per cent completed, but the constructors have to tie up some work before March in order to be ready for the monsoon when the water in the Chenab swells.

As both the diversion tunnels at the dam site8212;DT 1 and DT 28212;are blocked by the sediment left behind by the June-July 2005 floods, the engineers are already hard at work. They have bored a hole to let the water pass through.

Boris Lazaric of Lahmeyer International, the chief resident engineer and consultant to the Jammu and Kashmir government, says, 8220;February has been declared a month of emergency and we have fixed certain targets which have to be met in view of coming monsoon8221;.

During the last monsoon, the engineers had been able to reduce water in the reservoir and get a two-month dry period to plug the damages caused by soil erosion. Even the neutral expert Lafitte, during his visit to the dam site, was surprised at this innovation, says Lazaric. 8220;Impressed by this technique, the Central Water Commission and the Central Electricity Authority have asked us to make a presentation after the completion of the project,8221; he adds.

In fact, India8217;s design for the sluice spillways large outlets at the bottom was acknowledged, in Lafitte8217;s report, as the most important technique in managing the high volume sediment that characterises Himalayan rivers.

His stamp of approval will help India deal more effectively with the problems of sedimentation in its future hydel projects on Himalayan rivers in the state, says J-K Power Minister Rigzin Jora.

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Jammu 038; Kashmir has an expected hydel power potential of 20,000 MW, with 16,200 MW of it identified. Against this, only 483.7 MW power is being generated in the state sector and 1,170 MW in the central sector.

Though work was suspended after October 2006 pending the arbitrator8217;s verdict on the project, Lazaric said they had prepared the schedule in a such manner as to complete the project by December 2007. The power scheme could have been commissioned a year earlier, but for the 2005 floods in the Chenab that caused extensive damage and escalated its cost from Rs 4,000 crore to Rs 5,000 crore, he added.

The Baglihar project8212;to be commissioned in two phases,each generating 450 MW of power8212;was taken over from the NHPC by the state after Farooq Abdullah came to power in 1996. However, work on the first phase started only in 2000 and was estimated to be commissioned at a cost of Rs 4000 crore by December 2004.

At present, nearly 80 per cent of the civil and hydro-mechanical works being undertaken by JP Associates Ltd is complete. While 10,000 tonne of specially fabricated steel has been used in the project, steel bars totalling almost 400 km have been used in each of the three cavities.The essential work for the second stage of the Baglihar project is now on.