HYDROPOWER DEVELOPMENT IN HIMALAYAS PROSPECTS AND CHALLENGES

摘要

Our country is bestowed with abundant water resources helping us in the multitude of activities, including irrigation, water supply, and hydropower. The development and judicious use of such vast water potential has always been a key subject for the planners and specific thrust area has always been chosen to augment this renewable natural resource. Due to the steady progress of the country, the gap between the demand and production of power has tremendously increased resulting a need to increase the power generation. The source of the hydropower being cheap, eco-friendly, simple in operation and perpetual source of energy, has been given paramount importance to meet the acute energy needs of our country in the 21st century. Continuous efforts since independence, have been made to tap the vast hydropower potential of our country, resulting in commissioning of several multipurpose projects like Bhakra-Nangal, Hirakud, Damodar, Koyana, Rihand and Periyar, to name the few. From a modest 508 MW at independence, the installed capacity of hydropower plants in the country rose to 5900 MW, by the end of 3rd five year plan. The share of hydropower in the total installed capacity also reached 50%. Unfortunately, the pace of this progress could not be sustained, even after commissioning of many more Mega projects like Srisailam, Nagarjunasagar, Salal, Sanjay Vidyut Pariyojna and Hirakud stage II. The share of hydropower continued to drop and hover around 30 % or less since last two decades. The development of hydropower is required to be given the necessary impetus for sustained development of power. The mighty Himalayas, ranging in India between Arunachal Pradesh in the North East to Jammu and Kashmir in the North West are the vast resources of such huge hydropower potential in India. Nineteen river systems including the great Indus and Brahmaputra originate in Himalayas. Most of the snowmelt runoff from these rivers is received in the summer months of April to June, when there is heavy demand for water. The hydropower potential of the Himalayas, constitutes 78 % of the hydropower potential of the country. However, only 12.8 % of its potential has been utilized so far. The paper highlights the prospects offered by the Himalayas towards development of hydropower to alleviate the future gap of demand and production in the power. It also underlines the need to assess and harness the water resources of the Himalayas, to provide a solution to the water and power related problems likely to arise in the future. The challenging tasks before water resource managers and the future strategy to be adopted for utilizing the Himalayan resources for the hydropower development are briefly discussed.