By Tanmayee Tyagi
Dehradun, Uttarakhand: Khajani Devi is now close to a hundred, and most of her memories have faded. But she remembers the Song river: the water she grew up beside, worked beside, and lived beside for nearly eight decades after she arrived as a young bride in Sondhana, a village in Uttarakhand’s Tehri district.
Her house stood on the banks of the Song all these years, until the early hours of September 16, 2025, when the river rose without warning and carried it away – a surge that villagers say was intensified by construction for the upcoming Song dam upstream.
The Song begins near the Surkanda Devi temple, winds into Dehradun, joins the Suswa and then the Ganga. For generations, it has been known as the valley’s lifeline.
Residents told 101Reporters the river’s behaviour has changed in recent years. For Sondhana, the turning point came when work began on the Song Dam Drinking Water Project, a concrete gravity dam planned to supply drinking water to Dehradun.
On November 9, Prime Minister Narendra Modi – to mark 25 years of the formation of Uttarakhand – laid the foundation stone for the Song dam project with an outlay of Rs 2,492 crore.
Although full-scale construction has not yet begun, contractors built a 6-8 metre-high retaining wall in the river’s floodplain early this year, a move that villagers say has altered the river’s flow. And it was this wall that destroyed Khajani Devi’s home.
The project, which will create a concrete gravity dam covering about 69 hectares, aims to supply 150 million litres of drinking water per day to the region, along with irrigation, power and tourism benefits.
First proposed in 2003, it underwent preliminary investigations and geological studies by the Geological Survey of India before its detailed project report (DPR) was finalised in 2018.
According to Uttarakhand Jal Sansthan data cited in the DPR, Dehradun currently faces a shortage of 76.46 million litres of drinking water per day, a gap projected to rise to 256.02 MLD by 2051. To bridge this, the plan proposes capturing surplus monsoon water by constructing a 148.25-metre-high dam with a 6 MW powerhouse near Kumalda village.
Villagers said the retaining wall has already changed the river’s behaviour. “Song was once perennial, but with climate change and unauthorised construction upstream, the way the river moves changed,” said Kunti Panwar, Khajani Devi’s grandson’s wife. “Instead of following its natural course, the water hit the dam wall and was diverted towards the village. At least three houses were swept away along with fields and belongings.”
Khajani Devi’s family recalled carrying the hundred-year-old woman out on a palanquin in pitch darkness, with the river rising around them in September. They are now living in a neighbour’s home.
More than 70 days after the disaster, the village has not recovered. The houses that remain have developed deep cracks. Some sit on the edge of an eroded bank, held up by loose soil. “We will not survive another spell of unseasonal rain. The soil will become brittle,” said Beer Singh Panwar. Residents maintain that the Song had not caused damage on this scale before the wall went up.
For many in the village, the September flooding has sharpened their fears that a project meant to solve Dehradun’s water crisis may, under climate stress, end up creating new risks instead.
Experts describe this as a classic example of maladaptation: when an intervention meant to reduce risk ends up heightening vulnerability instead. The consequences of maladaptation have come up in global climate negotiations, including discussions on the Global Goal on Adaptation at COP29 and at the most recent meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-61).
The 6th assessment report of the IPCC (AR6) defines maladaptation as “actions that may lead to increased risk of adverse climate-related outcomes, including via increased greenhouse gas emissions, increased or shifted vulnerability to climate change, more inequitable outcomes, or diminished welfare, now or in the future. Most often, maladaptation is an unintended consequence”.
In simple terms, maladaptation occurs when a response to one stress, such as water scarcity, unintentionally worsens others, like flood risk, ecological instability or seismic vulnerability. In the case of the Song dam, Vishal Singh, Executive Director of the Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDR) in Dehradun, said the project may be creating new risks for river-bank communities even before the structure is complete.
A total of 50 households, comprising 486 persons from three villages — Sondhana, Rangargaon and Ghurshalgaon — will be fully submerged due to the project. And most of these families are dependent on agriculture. Their land will be acquired for the project under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (RFCTLARR Act), which replaced the colonial-era Land Acquisition Act, 1894. In March 2021, any major changes or new construction on the land notified for the project were halted under the Act.
Affected individuals have expressed willingness to relocate to more suitable areas within the Doon Valley, contingent upon receiving adequate compensation. The state has identified land in Ranipokhari for their rehabilitation. “For the last four years, they kept telling us that relocation would happen soon, but it still has not happened,” Ravinder Panwar, a farmer from Sondhana and president of the Song Dam Affected and Rehabilitation Committee, said. “They want to displace an agricultural community of the hills to the plains, where it will take our farmers years to adjust to the new soil. They don’t want to give us as much land as we currently own, but they want to take our generational land to build a dam that will not even benefit us, but the urban people in Dehradun.” Beer Singh added, “For more than 400 years, our families have lived along the Song and cultivated our fields. Instead of the ten bigha [1.6 hectares] we currently have, they are offering us only 2.5 bigha [0.4 hectares]. That is not enough to grow the same harvest.”
According to Beena Semwal, a Special Land Acquisition Officer for the project, it will take another three to four months just for the administration to complete legal formalities for the rehabilitation process.
“While land is available at Ranipokhari, we have to build an entire community there, including a school, a health centre, among other facilities. That process will take another year,” she said.
Certain governmental clearances are also awaited, officials added.
The rapidly changing behaviour of the river raises questions about whether the dam can achieve its purpose.“When the project research was done, initial investigations in the early 2000s and detailed studies completed by 2011, the river’s morphology was very different. Even today, the irrigation department lists the Song as a perennial river, but on the ground it behaves more like a seasonal stream, with water levels falling sharply,” said Dehradun-based environmental activist Reenu Paul. “Every monsoon, the river brings down rubble from unchecked construction in the upper reaches, causing severe damage downstream, as we saw this year. These erratic episodes will only increase. By the time the project nears completion, the Song may not even hold enough water for the dam to function.”
Environmental groups also pointed to ongoing mining and drilling on the riverbed and the proposed felling of over 12,500 trees, information obtained through a Right to Information request by the Dehradun-based environmental organisation Citizens for Green Doon, which they argue will destabilise the valley further. In 2024, authorities marked nearly 2,000 sal trees in the Khalanga reserve forest for felling for a filtration plant, before pausing the action after protests.
“If one wall for the dam can cause this level of destruction, the combined effect of large-scale tree felling, drilling and riverbed mining will only heighten the danger, creating changes the region may not be able to withstand,” said Ira Chauhan of Citizens for Green Doon. She added that instead of addressing real-time ecological deterioration, from unchecked construction to waste entering the river, authorities have prioritised a future-oriented project whose success remains uncertain. “Almost 25 years after the state’s formation, we are still living with the dislocation and environmental consequences of the Tehri dam,” she said.
Scientists also said that the broader approach towards the project itself may be flawed. “Relying on heavy engineering solutions in a climate-stressed and geologically fragile region is not advisable,” said CEDR’s Singh. “Such structures depend on multiple external factors and can fail catastrophically when those systems are stressed. Instead, strengthening natural water sources, improving groundwater recharge and using nature-based solutions are more viable and resilient. Dehradun receives substantial rainfall. The government’s ‘catch the rain’ programme is more sustainable.”
Similar warnings have been issued in the past for other Himalayan dam projects, including Tehri, where scientists flagged the risks posed by its location in an earthquake-prone zone, the potential for catastrophic flooding in case of failure, and the likelihood of landslides and increased seismicity once the reservoir filled.
Environmental experts have raised similar concerns about the Song Dam Drinking Water Project as well, pointing to its social and ecological impacts.
The proposed Song dam site lies close to the Himalayan Thrustal Front, an active seismic zone. “If the dam sustains damage due to seismic activity, the entire Doon valley could face large-scale devastation,” Paul said.
A senior irrigation department official said the project has been designed with seismic precautions. “When constructed scientifically, the project does not pose a risk,” the official said.
However, scientists maintain that unless the project accounts for these growing climate and geological stresses, it risks deepening the valley’s vulnerabilities rather than reducing them.
Back in Sondhana, Khajani Devi does not dwell on her survival. Her thoughts return to the loss of her home and land. “The river punished us for someone else’s mistake,” she told 101Reporters.
A home can be rebuilt, but the life they lived beside the river cannot.
“Our next generation will never know what it was like waking up to the song of the river Song,” an elder said.
This project is supported by the Internews Earth Journalism Network with funding from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida)
This article was originally published in 101 Reporters under Creative Common license. Read the original article.
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