According to a report from International Rivers; “Out of world’s 177 largest rivers, only one third is free flowing, and just 21 rivers longer than 1,000 kilometres retain a direct connection to the sea.”Thus dams are being removed across the world. (we can see the list of dams removed here) In 1984 California’s Trinity River Basin Fish and Wildlife Management Act (see here) was signed, authorizing the secretary of the interior to develop and implement a management program to restore the fish and wildlife populations in the Trinity River to levels which existed prior to construction of trinity and Lewiston dams.
Similarly Pak Mun Dam was completed in 1994 for generation of electricity in Thailand due to which more than 20000 people have been affected by the drastic reduction in fish populations upstream of the Dam site. Observing this Thailand Government agreed to open the dam gates in june 2001. (Report by International Rivers)
“International Rivers is working with Pak Mun villagers and the Assembly of the poor to demand that the Pak Mun Dam be decommissioned and the river restored. On March 23, 1999, more than 5,000 villagers occupied the Pak Mun Dam site and established Ban.” (By International Report)
Again, in the report of American Rivers (Page 20 – 29). we can see that USA has removed 467 dams for Ecological issues, Economical issues, Safety issues, Recreation issues, Failure issues, unauthorized dams issues and most of the dams were removed, which were under construction. Now whole over there is a movement against dams for conservation of ecology. By Jagadguru Shankaracharya “Ganga additionally has a huge emotional, cultural and spiritual vale”.(Shankaracharya’s Statement available here). It is strange that the world is removing dams merely for ecology but we are destroying Ganga and her ecology and culture by making more dams.
