The Tehri dam, when completed, will be one of the highest dams in the world harnessing the waters of two important Himalayan rivers – Bhagirathi and Bhilangana. Tehri dam is finally expected to be 260.5 m high and impound 3.22 million cu m of water. The reservoir is expected to irrigate 2,70,000 hectares of land and generate 346 mw of hydel power. The dam will completely submerge Tehri town and 23 villages, while 72 other villages will be partially submerged. Nearly 5,200 hectares of land will also be lost to the reservoir. In addition, about 85,000 persons will be displaced by the dam.

The Tehri dam has witnessed continuous questioning and protest by various people, including the noted environmentalist Sunderlal Bahuguna who has virtually made it his life-long mission to stop the construction of the dam by living at the dam site and by going on periodic fasts. To marshal their case, the Tehri opposition has tried to establish connections between ecological, social and mythical values through scientific studies, environmental campaigns and cultural religious references, thus engaging in a wide gamut of environmental politics.

Those opposed to the dam emphasise the economic life and structure of the dam, its geology and seismicity, displacement and rehabilitation, cost and benefit. They also talk about the cultural and religious values of the Ganga river and the Himalayan region. They attempt to use scientific knowledge to explain their perceptions of imaginative and emotional truths. They go on fasts, dharnas, demonstrations, and other agitational programmes, to focus on their demands.

The anti-Tehri dam politics has been subject to a collaborative relationship between what is ‘factual’, ‘scientific’ and ‘technical’ and what is ‘religious’, ‘faith’, ‘emotional’ and ‘mythical’. This collaboration seeks to heal the great environmental and cultural wound that development and the dam has inflicted on the region. Towards this end, they speak the language of ecological politics, as it was the universal language of the anti big-dam movement of the 1970s. They also invoke certain metaphors, and it is through many of these that the anti-dam forces, more especially Sunderlal Bahuguna, reach out to particular religious practices and mythical beliefs. In their use of these metaphors and myths, the environmentalists often come close to the beliefs of conservative Hindu forces and their chosen communal path. In effect, the metaphor and the myth is the Trojan horse through which communal politics enters and re-enters green politics.

Attitudes against big projects and dams, the Tehri dam in particular, were part of the growth of the environmental movement in India in the 1970s. This period is generally seen as one of growing environmental consciousness and movements. One popular mode was to use facts and figures, scientific methods and techniques, to challenge a project that too claimed to be based on scientific calculation and assessment. The concern with reason and measurement, data and cost calculation was like a social enterprise and found expression not only in the setting up of the Tehri Bandh Virodhi Sangharsh Samiti in 1978 and its various campaigns, but also in several studies, research papers and articles.

Through an analysis of technical, social and environmental variables, it has been argued that the economic life of the dam will not exceed 61.4 years and the dam will not yield promised results within the next fifty years at least, by which time the reservoir would be substantially silted up. Regarding the real life situation of the Tehri dam oustees, problems of land alienation, destitution, inequality, abrupt and forced changes in the agricultural pattern, breakage of the joint family system, total lack of the village commons, educational and health facilities were emphasised.

Environmental politics against big projects is often also the preservation and pursuit of the natural and the beautiful. Aesthetic issues revolve around the depiction of what is pristine and heavenly at the project site and what constitutes natural and harmonious living. This has been an important part of the criticism against big projects like dams. In the particular case of Tehri dam, the region and the project site have been repeatedly referred to as pious, peaceful and solitary. The Himalayan region and the Ganga are seen as symbols of a divine force, a thing of beauty and a point of contact with the infinite. Though this landscape regularly appears on the canvas of environmentalists, it is not necessarily associated with mythical and religious figures and symbols.