Bury IWT, Reclaim Chenab—Part III of the Western‑River Revival
PREFACE: The Indus Waters Treaty is now history, and every cubic metre of the western rivers is once again India’s to shape. Across three articles, this being the third, we lay out the full spectrum of technically feasible projects—mega, mini and micro—on the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab that New Delhi can launch immediately: high‑rise storage dams and pumped‑storage caverns, medium run‑of‑river upgrades, and village‑scale micro‑schemes. No more treaty‑imposed storage caps, diversion bans or foreign vetoes—only engineering imagination, environmental care and national will.
Bury IWT, Reclaim Chenab—Part III of the Western‑River Revival
1. Treaty Scrapped, Chenab Unleashed
The Indus Waters Treaty once ring‑fenced the Chenab for Pakistan, allowing India just trickles of run‑of‑river power and a token slice of live storage. With the pact gone, the entire Indian reach—from the glaciers of Lahaul to the Line of Control in Poonch—stands free. Twelve turbulent gorges, 6 000‑plus metres of cumulative head and more than ten million acre‑feet of average flow can finally be bent to Indian purpose.
2. The Flagship: Bursar Grand Storage Dam
Deep in the Marusudar gorge a concrete‑face rock‑fill wall will now rise to 265 metres, creating about 4 MAF (4.9 billion m³) of live storage—double the volume once planned and enough to master the entire Chenab cascade. The enlarged power cavern packs 1.6 GW of daytime generation, while the reservoir itself becomes the winter lifeline for Jammu, Kathua and a thirsty northern plains. The cost, ₹35–40 thousand crore, scales directly from the original Bursar DPR (₹24 thousand crore) with additions for height, seismic design and inflation.
3. Building the Power Stack
Sawalkot Super‑Dam. Raise the concrete gravity wall to 200 metres, fold in gated flood‑control bays and push capacity to 2.2 GW. Budget: ₹30 thousand crore, derived from the present 1 850‑MW estimate plus storage and safety extras.
Pakal Dul & Ratle Crest‑Lifts. With treaty shackles gone the two under‑construction plants get true daily ponds—turning 1.85 GW into 2.75 GW for a modest ₹13 thousand crore combined.
Gyspa Glacier Vault. A 190‑metre rock‑fill dam high in Lahaul traps 0.8 MAF (≈1 billion m³) of early‑melt flow, drives a 450 MW plant and drip‑feeds the rest of the cascade in autumn. Cost: ₹12 thousand crore, benchmarked against Tehri.
Padder–Kishtwar Pumped Storage. Two hanging valleys near Dul‑Hasti form the upper and lower bowls of a 1.2 GW / 10 GWh daily cycle machine, tagged at ₹10 thousand crore using Tehri PSP rates.
Together, the stack delivers more than 8 GW of firm or dispatchable power—enough to stabilise the northern grid and soak up every surplus solar electron north of the Sutlej.
4. Water on the Move
Chenab–Beas Gravity Link. A forty‑kilometre head‑race bored under Dalhousie draws 300 cusecs (≈ 1 MAF a year) into the Ravi–Beas canal lattice, bullet‑proofing Punjab and Rajasthan against glacier loss. The ₹28 thousand crore estimate comes straight from the Chenab–Beas DPR plus tunnelling inflation.
Ujh–Sutlej Extension. The almost‑finished Ujh multipurpose dam near Kathua grows a saddle wall and a spur tunnel to pour surplus monsoon water into the Upper Sutlej system—₹15 thousand crore, costed off current Ujh contracts.
Jammu Drinking‑Water Grid. The Bursar outlet feeds a 200‑kilometre steel trunk line that finally frees Jammu city from erratic Tawi flows for a modest ₹3 thousand crore.
5. Price Tag & National Dividend
Roll everything together—grand storage, super‑dams, pumped storage, twin tunnels, urban water—and the bill lands at roughly ₹1.15–1.25 lakh crore. In return India locks up nearly 6 MAF of new storage on the Chenab, commands well over 8 GW of hydro capacity and pushes one additional MAF every year into the eastern canal grid.
6. Engineering Realities
Yes, the gorge country is seismically alive. Every new wall comes with double PVC cores, full‑gallery grouting and live fibre‑optic strain monitoring. Debris‑laden flash floods? Bursar’s twin low‑level tunnels are sized for 2 000 m³/s sediment blasts. Ice loads in winter? Heated pier noses and steel snow sheds over radial bays take care of them. And the LoC remains sacrosanct: Sawalkot’s backwater ends fifteen kilometres short of the cease‑fire line, putting the project—and our gunners—safely out of enemy artillery range.
7. How Pakistan Feels the Heat
Mangla and Tarbela live off Chenab flow in January–February. Hold just one‑and‑a‑half MAF behind Bursar through the lean season and Pakistan’s canal openings slump by twenty per‑cent; release it instead during June cloudbursts and you slice the flood crest racing toward Guddu by the same margin. India’s new switch can punish wheat in winter or rescue Sindh in summer—and Islamabad will bargain hard to avoid the first while begging for the second. Terror comes with a hydraulic cost.
8. The Strategic Pay‑Off
For less than last year’s food subsidy India converts the Chenab gorge into a giant water battery, a flood gate and a geopolitical lever. North India gains peak power, glacier‑proof irrigation and urban drinking water. Pakistan confronts a dam it cannot shell, a reservoir it cannot sabotage and a neighbour no longer bound by vintage paper. The treaty is history; the river, at last, serves the Republic of India.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t claim to be an expert and I have no access to privileged information. The article below is stitched together from material freely available on the public internet, with cost figures based on transparent, good‑faith assumptions. As I often say, it’s better to be approximately correct than precisely wrong.