Damn safety

Central dam safety law needs assured funding

The government’s move to enact legislation for ensuring safety of dams seems well-intentioned, even if the states may view it as central intervention in their constitutional domain. The need for a central law has been repeatedly voiced since 1987 by the National Committee on Dam Safety on which the state governments and others involved in dam management are also represented. This has been reiterated also by the parliamentary standing committee on water resources in its report tabled in Parliament in the recently concluded Budget session. India has hundreds of dams — 4,711 to be precise, according to the National Register of Large Dams. About 390 more dams are under construction. Most of these dams have already crossed their stipulated life span, being more than 50 years old. Over 100 of them are, in fact, more than a century old. Consequently, serious misgivings have arisen over their ability to withstand the stresses caused by earthquakes, unusual rainfall patterns, increased water flows due to denudation of upstream catchments and even mismanagement of water storage. There have been close to a score of notable reservoir failures in the past century, most of which have had catastrophic consequences. More recently, there was the disaster of the collapse of Jamunia dam in Madhya Pradesh in 2002. There are several cases of breach of dam embankments around the country. The devastating floods in southern states during the last monsoon season, on the other hand, were the result of flawed operation of the reservoirs.

 

The root cause of all this is the failure of the states to ensure proper upkeep of the dams and the management of the reservoirs, keeping in view their stress-bearing capacity. There is hardly any mechanism for regular monitoring to ensure dam safety. The Dam Safety Organisation, set up by the Union water resources ministry, has only an advisory role and has, therefore, proved least effective. Besides, the states seldom set apart adequate funds for dam maintenance in their annual budgets, and the revenue generated through water charges and other sources by the project management authorities are usually too meagre to cover even the operational expenses.

The proposed Bill seeks to address some of these concerns and lays down uniform dam safety procedures for all states. But, on the downside, the mechanism proposed for surveillance, inspection, operation and maintenance, crucial for ensuring dam safety, is meant only for the dams of certain parameters (called specified dams) and not for all dams. Moreover, the Bill does not address the challenge of finding fiscal resources to deal with dam maintenance. Should the beneficiaries of public works, rich farmers in this case, not be required to pay for at least some of the upkeep? The onus of guaranteeing dam safety has once again been put on the states, which have so far failed to do so. It remains to be seen how many states will, in fact, make use of the proposed law, since they have to first ratify the central Bill and adopt it for themselves.