Quake warning signal to Teesta Barrage and dams

The 6.9 magnitude earthquake at Nepal-Sikkim border of September 18 has left a trail of destruction behind along with human woes. But the geographers, seismologists and experts are viewing it as a warning signal for the proposed series of dams in North East region and barrages on rivers, including one on River Teesta.

The Teesta Barrage was proposed in the Teesta Water Sharing treaty, which could not be signed between two Prime Ministers — Manmohan Singh and Hasina Wajed — due to Paschimbanga Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s objection. According to the experts and scientists, the government should honour this warning to the engineer-contractor-IAS-politician lobby which is hell-bent on construction of mega-hydel projects and dams in the region or accept the worst truth.

The Himalaya region is highly fragile and is on seismologically sensitive region. Collisions between these Indo-Tibetian and Eurasian Plate are a continuous process and latest quake is also fallout of such collision.  Subrata Sinha, ex-Deputy Director General, Geological Survey of India (GSI), who headed GSI’s North-Eastern headquarters in the early 1980s, termed this major quake as an warning to proposed construction of dams and barrages in North India.

Agreeing to what Mr Sinha said, another Ex Director general of GSI, Devasish Chatterjee, urged the government to study its impact and cancel the proposed dams and barrages in North Eastern region. Dr. U. Mukhopadhyay, Reader, Geography department of Vidyasagar College, also feels the same and said, “It is a tectonic quake, linked to the earth's crust deformation.” This deformation can lead to disaster if the warning is not read properly.

Talking to TSI, Subrata Sinha, who worked for several years in Rajasthan developing expertise in desert geology, said, “This earthquake should be a lesson for the policy-making pundits in New Delhi. They should modestly learn the river-dynamics of Teesta before preparing the draft water-distribution treaty in Bangaldesh and scrapped all dams and hydel projects on Teesta.”

Seismologists have been talking about a major earthquake in this region for more than a decade. Anxiety were expressed after Tsunami at Bay of Bengal and Muzaffarabad quake disasters, but “it seems, Government has not responded to their anxiety”, said Mr. Sinha. Former Director, GSI, Dr Dakshina Ranjan Nandy was pioneer in studying dynamics of geo-environmental area including natural hazards like earthquakes for over two decades.

Mr Nandy said, “Fortunately, the earthquake didn’t have a bigger intensity although some hazards are very likely to happen. The administration should be prepared for landslides in the Darjeeling Hill areas and the vicinity.”

Same warning is uttered by Prof Dhruba Mukherjee, Ex-Head of Geology Department at Calcutta University, an internationally reputed structural geologist on plate tectonics, opined that a major earthquake was overdue in the eastern Himalayas a more disastrous quake can hit this region. Corroborating Gap Theory he said, “It might happen anytime at Sikkim-Nepal region.”