India has proposed the construction of a 269-metre high dam on the Sapta Koshi River at about 400 meters upstream from the Barah Chhetra Temple, in eastern hills, to generate around 300 MW of electricity and irrigating thousands of hectares of lands.

Barah Chhetra is a Hindu pilgrimage site.

Indian minister for Water Resources Pawan Kumar Banshal forwarded this proposal at a press-conference held in Kathmandu on Sunday, July 12, 2009 prior to winding up his two day brief Nepal visit.

The Indian minister was in Nepal to monitor repair works carried out by the Indian government after last year’s damage caused by the Koshi River.

“The long-term solution to control floods in the area is to construct the high dam”, said Banshal.

“I have invited my Nepali counterpart to hold discussions over this issue in New Delhi”, added the Indian Minister.

Nepal’s irrigation Minister Mr. Bal Krishna Khand who accompanied the Indian minister at the press-conference thanked India for showing its well-intention and said that the government of Nepal was also keen to look for long term solution to control the damage being caused by the Koshi River.

An already rejected proposal while King Mahendra was Head of the State and B.P. Koirala as the government head, the Indian government has once again, after a span of five decades, forwarded the same proposal notably after republican order established in the country.

King Mahendra after the site visit then had out rightly rejected the proposal saying that the project was neither in the larger interest of the local population nor that of the country , say Nepal’s energy experts.

Amid much hue and cry from the local population, that the local environment would be adversely affected by the construction of the mega-project, the then Maoists’ led government had allowed the Indian technicians to carry out their feasibility studies in the area only recently.

During his visit to India as the prime minister of the country, Maoists’ Chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal had assured the Indian regime that the Government of Nepal will facilitate the Construction of Koshi High Dam and provide safety to the Indian technicians.

“Sapta Koshi High Dam is a project that is not in Nepal’s interest,” says energy expert Mr. Hari Man Shrestha who is a council member, Center of Energy Studies, Institute of Engineering, Nepal.

“Officials of the Nepali establishment are deeply caught up in India’s water politics”, he adds.

Survey expert Buddhi Narayan Shrestha opines that if the Koshi High Dam were to be built at Baraha Chhetra as per Indian insistence, the valleys and villages upstream of the dam in Dhankuta, Bhojpur and Terahthum would be submerged into waters.

“There is also no guarantee that this dam will prevent further devastation in India’s Bihar State for long as cherished by the Indian planners.”

Analysts claim that the Indian minister was here not to watch the Koshi river damage but to “seduce” or even coerce the Nepali minister Mr. Khand to toe his line.

High placed sources in Kathmandu say that the Nepal government had to split the water resource ministry into two as per the Indian instructions: the first being the water resources and the second one as “ministry of energy”.

 â€˜It is a suicidal project for Nepal”, Buddhi Narayan Shrestha concludes.

Similarly, Dipak Gyawali, a former Minister of Water Resources is very much concerned over the technology used to construct the high dam over Koshi.

In an interview published few months back in the Kathmandu Post, Gyawali had claimed that the construction would take two or three decades, which thus will fail to address problems of current and immediate future concerns.

“It is extremely expensive, does not address the primary problem of sedimentation (the reservoir will fill up too soon with Himalayan muck), has no convincing answer regarding the cost of attending to high seismicity in the region as well as diversion of peak instantaneous flood during construction (it is a major engineering challenge with no easy solution), and will create more social problems when indigenous population in Nepal have to be evicted from their ancestral homes”.

A Koshi high dam would tantamount to Nepal importing downstream seasonal floods as permanent feature of its landscape for questionable benefits to it, Gyawali had told the Kathmandu Post.

“I think neither India nor Nepal is in a position to afford the technical, economic and social costs associated with it”, he concludes.