The Himalaya Is Not a Battlefield: Why India’s Dam Rush After the Indus Treaty Suspension Is a Mistake Only Ordinary Indians Will Pay For

By General Ghulam Mustafa (Served in different staff and command assignments, commanded a Corps, raised and commanded Army Strategic Force Command)

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Engineer Arshad H Abbasi, Co-founder, Energy Excellence Centres at NUST and Engineering University Peshawar, International Transboundary Water Expert 

When New Delhi put the Indus Waters Treaty into abeyance in April 2025, it framed the move as strategic leverage against Pakistan. Eighteen months on, that leverage has translated mainly into one thing: a fast-tracked construction boom for the Pakal Dul, Kiru, Kwar, Ratle, Sawalkote and Kirthai-I and II hydropower projects on the Chenab, alongside renewed dam-building pressure across Ladakh, Jammu & Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh. This is being sold to the public as energy security and national resolve. It is neither. It is a geopolitical gesture being built, quite literally, on some of the most unstable mountains on Earth — and the bill, in lives and in rupees, is being handed to Indian citizens, not to Pakistan.

The courts have already said so. In August 2025, a Supreme Court bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan, hearing a case on Himachal Pradesh’s development model, did not mince words: unchecked hydropower expansion, tunnelling and unscientific road-building were named as direct drivers of the state’s mounting disasters, with the bench noting that the once-mighty Sutlej “stands reduced to a rivulet.” The Court converted the matter into a suo motu public interest case — an extraordinary judicial red flag over exactly the model now being accelerated in the Chenab basin. Nobody in government appears to have been listening.

The mountains keep confirming it. In February 2021, an ice-and-rock avalanche in Chamoli obliterated the Rishiganga plant and crippled the Tapovan-Vishnugad project, leaving well over 200 dead or missing. In October 2023, a glacial lake outburst flood from South Lhonak Lake destroyed Sikkim’s 1,200-MW Teesta-III dam at Chungthang in minutes, killing more than 50 people and displacing over 7,000 — a disaster experts had explicitly warned was coming, given the dam’s location in a GLOF-prone gorge. And on August 14, 2026, heavy monsoon rain sent debris and water surging into an under-construction THDC tunnel at the Vishnugad-Pipalkoti project in Chamoli, killing at least seven workers — barely weeks after a similar tunnel disaster killed workers on another state hydro project in Sikkim. This is not bad luck. It is a pattern, on the very rivers the government now wants to dam faster.

Then look at Nepal, next door, sharing the same geology. The glacial collapse and flash floods along the Nepal-China border in 2026 wiped out or damaged roughly 10–11% of the country’s entire generation capacity — 281 MW destroyed outright, 388 MW under construction damaged, 150 MW more cut off from the grid by destroyed transmission infrastructure. Nepal’s hard-won status as a net power exporter, worth $142 million in FY2026, is now at risk of reversal. Direct hydropower damage is estimated at up to $230 million, with total reconstruction costs of $4–5 billion — nearly a tenth of Nepal’s GDP. Tellingly, the only structures that survived intact were the underground ones; everything built on the surface near the riverbed was destroyed. That is the design lesson the entire Himalayan arc — India included — is being handed for free. It is a warning, not an anomaly.

Now compare the economics. The six projects are enormous and enormously expensive: Pakal Dul (1,000 MW, roughly in  Indian rupees Rs 8,100 crore), Ratle (850 MW, roughly Rs 5,280 crore just for the initial approval, since revised upward), Kiru, Kwar, Sawalkote (1,856 MW) and the Kirthai twins. Large Himalayan hydro of this kind, once financing costs, tunnelling, geological surprises and decades-long construction timelines are folded in, routinely produces power in the Rs 5–7 per unit range once regulators finalize tariffs — small hydro in Himachal and the Northeast has already been cleared by regulators at Rs 4.76–6.02 per kWh. Compare that with where solar and wind stand today: recent SECI and state auctions have discovered solar tariffs as low as Rs 2.17–2.62 per unit, with grid-scale solar in Himachal itself now settled around Rs 3.3–3.5 per unit, and wind tariffs bottoming out near Rs 2.44–2.76 per unit. Even with storage added, hybrid renewable tariffs remain well below what these new mega-dams will need to charge to recover their swelling capital costs. The era in which giant Himalayan hydro was the cheapest way to keep the lights on is over. It ended years ago. Building six more mega-dams on a fault-riddled, glacier-fed, monsoon-lashed mountain range to prove a geopolitical point to Islamabad is not an energy strategy. It is an expensive, dangerous one.

We say this as people who want both things India’s own courts, own engineers and own tragedies have been telling it for years: that Indian lives in Chamoli, Kishtwar and Mangan deserve protection from entirely foreseeable hydrological disasters, and that Indian consumers deserve the cheapest, most reliable power available — which today is solar and wind, not billion-dollar tunnels through crumbling rock. A government that truly cared about either goal would be redirecting this capital into distributed renewables and grid storage, not racing to finish dams whose primary justification is denying water and power infrastructure to Pakistan. Treating the Himalaya as a theatre of rivalry, rather than as the fragile, still-forming mountain range it geologically is, shows little care for the Indian workers who die in these tunnels or the Indian ratepayers who will eventually cover the cost overruns.

The only sane long-term answer is to stop treating the Himalaya as real estate for infrastructure trophies. The region’s seismic youth, retreating glaciers and unstable slopes argue for treating large stretches of it as a protected ecological buffer — ideally under a UNESCO-recognized conservation framework — rather than a construction site for projects whose main purpose is symbolic. Of course, the government would argue these dams also serve legitimate needs: grid balancing, water storage for irrigation, jobs, and long-term leverage in a genuinely fraught relationship with Pakistan. Those arguments deserve a hearing. But they do not answer the Indian Supreme Court’s warning, nor the workers still being pulled from flooded tunnels. India does not need to choose between safety and cheap power. It has already chosen wrong twice — in Chamoli and Chungthang. A third time, in Kishtwar, would not be resolved. It would be recklessness with a flag on it.