Softbank, that somewhat eccentric internet company in Japan run by an equally maverick Masayoshi Son, has just announced that it will lead a JV with Bharti in solar energy, investing $ 10 billion – that is about 63,500 crores – over the next ten years to generate, hold your breath, 20,000 megawatts of power.
These numbers, by any standard of energy generation - conventional or otherwise, are awe-inspiring, and, hopefully, not just for the media to digest, but real. Pricewater Coopers says that, if implemented today, it would be the size of the entire power generation capacity of Greece or the Philippines.
More importantly, this number is 50 per cent of India's current installed hydropower generation capacity. And that is the reason I am attempting to look for unintended consequences of such immense investment.
But first, about hydropower. Which means, dams.
A day after Softbank’s announcement, the Business Standard carried the following write-up:
India's largest hydroelectric project has been given all the requisite clearances by the environment ministry in spite of repeated rejections by its own experts. The 3,000-Mw Dibang river valley mega dam in Arunachal Pradesh, once fully built, will wipe clean 4,577 hectares of forest that is also the homeland of a small community of 12,000, the Idu Mishmi.
The project worth Rs 25,000 crore was approved on September 22 last year without a study to understand the downstream impact. Instead, the ministry has asked that a study be carried out five years after the dam is commissioned. Likely to be completed in nine years, the study will be done, therefore, 14 years later.
According to norms, such studies are to be carried out cumulatively for all hydroelectric projects on the river concerned before clearance is given.
The dam is only one of 17 planned on the river that flows through the Dibru Saikhowa National Park.
It was originally rejected by the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) in July 2013, the apex body advising the ministry on granting of forest clearances. Ultimately, talks between the environment and power ministries pushed the project by overruling earlier rejections. Repeated meetings and letters over the next one-and-a-half years between the two ministries finally succeeded in clinching the forest clearance, government records show. FAC, in spite of comprising some of the most senior forest officials in the ministry, cannot give non-binding recommendations.
Serious discrepancies in releasing accurate data were repeatedly seen on the part of the state government and project developer, National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), during the clearance process. This included failing to mention that chopping down 325,000 trees would critically endanger the refuge for animals such as elephants, tigers, fishing cats and snow leopards.
Unquote
India's search for power is the single biggest threat to our forests and wildlife and hydropower is a reason – a big reason – why fish are disappearing from our rivers. Many species of fish swim up the river to spawn and lay eggs in sand. Dams stop them from doing so and disrupt their breeding resulting in precipitous decline in native fish after their habitat is modified by dam construction.
Fish, of course, are also hit by pollution of the rivers, sand mining and unsustainable forms of fishing including the use of dynamite, yet dams probably head the ‘villians’ list. In the last twenty years, India’s race for power has been energised by coal and hydro, at a scale that is mind-numbing. And, as the fish have disappeared, the otters have too.
Softbank is certainly not the first company to set up a solar park in India, but in sheer scale and ambition it has the potential to be a game changer. Hopefully - cross my fingers and twist my toes, roll my eyes and rub my nose - hopefully, we are reaching a point where the need for new dams, will be questioned by the decision makers, because a credible, workable alternative – solar energy – now exists, the costs of which have dropped 25% in the last three years, and are dropping every year as new ingenious ways of harnessing the sun’s energy are commercialised.
Hence the optimism. And a hope that Softbank will help the otter - and all other forms of wildlife, aquatic and terrestrial - survive.
