Climate change has the potential to dramatically disrupt the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in South Asia. The trends that loom largest are less predictable rainfall and hotter temperatures.1 To counteract these developments, governments in the region have called for international investment and aid, sought to expand the use of renewable energy, and begun planning resilience and adaptation measures with potentially major effects on their citizens’ lives.2
As Jasmin Logg-Scarvell detailed earlier in this series, mobilizing resources to mitigate and adapt to climate change requires governments to draw on climate science, which can be used to support state-led policies. But it can also be used to oppose them. This article examines an instance of the latter: the integration of climate science into the anti-dam movements of Northeast India. The Northeast, a topographically and culturally diverse region, has long had a fractious relationship with the rest of India. Dams represent a flashpoint that symbolizes the state’s power to reshape the landscape and the lives that depend on it.
Since the late 1990s, the Indian government has presented large dams in the Northeast as an environmentally friendly and necessary means of meeting power demand.3 For almost as long, activists have used the rhetoric of mitigation and adaptation to push back. In the process, they have blurred customary distinctions between environmental and climate-focused activism. The history of activism around such projects exemplifies how activist movements that begin with cleavages over jobs or the local environment can reorient themselves toward climate change in response to international influences and the worsening climate crisis.
This article begins with a depiction of environmentalism and dam development in India, particularly the Northeast. It then zooms in on the Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Project (LSHEP), an especially contentious dam, to examine the role of climate science in the rhetoric used to try to stop its construction. The article concludes with a reflection on the prospects for the continued integration of climate-focused rhetoric into the region’s environmental protection and conservation movements.
Environmentalism and Development in Northeast India
Indian environmentalism has three broad traditions, each associated with a socioeconomic class. Elite-led conservationist movements began before independence and emphasize protecting wild spaces, flora, and fauna. Middle-class environmentalism centers access to clean air and water, especially in urban areas. Environmentalism of the poor is produced mostly in rural contexts and involves marginalized populations staking claims to natural resources in opposition to state- and corporation-led extractive development. Sharachchandra Lele, an environmental researcher, describes this third form of environmentalism as positing “that communities living in close proximity with natural resources, especially the poor, are generally predisposed towards sustainable use of resources, and the problem of degradation originates in their powerlessness in the face of takeover/handover of these resources by/to industry in the name of development.”4
Most environmental movements have involved an overlap of traditions. But India’s large rural population and many ethnic cleavages have resulted in environmentalism of the poor being the most visible. India’s most famous environmental movement, the Chipko Andolan, erupted in the 1970s when villagers in the erstwhile hill tracts of Uttar Pradesh mobilized to prevent contract logging by lowlanders and protect their own claims to forest resources.5 Chipko is the archetypal example of sociologist Pradip Swarnakar’s statement that “protest is an outcome of the livelihood crises faced by marginalized populations that are highly dependent on natural resources.”6 Similar tensions produced the Narmada Bachao Andolan, an anti-dam movement; the Jungle Bachao Andolan, an anti-plantation movement; and many efforts to guarantee tribal access to minor forest produce.7 These movements have all been organized around a central question: Who is more deserving of the right to extract and make use of natural resources? Is it the poor, the rural, and the marginalized or corporations, urban elites, and the centralized state?
The Northeast, as is the case with many peripheries, has often been the target of extraction—for tea, oil, and now, electricity—the benefits of which have not accrued to the grassroots.8 As a result, the region has long played host to secessionist movements and ethnic insurgencies.9 Though lauded by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, as “temples of the new age,” dams in the Northeast have often been an irritant, not a balm, to these tensions.10 The initial phase of dam construction in the Northeast, which took place in the 1970s, featured the construction of Ithai Dam in Manipur and Gumti Hydroelectric Project in Tripura. Both schemes resulted in flooding and displacement that dispossessed locals of both land and ecological stability without clear resettlement measures.11 In Assam, the Brahmaputra Board, which was established to control flooding and erosion on the eponymous river, received more public buy-in but was also criticized when it appeared distracted from local concerns.
Dams in the Northeast have often been an irritant, not a balm, to underlying tensions.
While early dam projects in the Northeast were intended to deliver a trifecta of flood control, irrigation, and hydroelectricity, in the 1990s, dam construction moved toward exclusively generating power. This was partially a consequence of intense local and national opposition to impoundment dams.12 Run-of-the-river projects, the new favorite technique for dam construction, caused less displacement and were less costly than multipurpose projects. But the renewed push for hydroelectricity also reflected development imperatives. In the Brahmaputra River and its tributaries, the central government saw underused potential for hydropower that could meet power demands for swaths of the country beyond the Northeast.13 In 2003, then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee “directed India to generate 50,000 megawatts of power by constructing 162 big new hydropower stations—most of them planned for the Himalayas,” according to journalist Keith Schneider.14 At one point that decade, 165 large dam projects had been proposed for the Northeast alone.15 Dam construction was to be implemented by federal entities, such as the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) and North Eastern Electric Power Company (NEEPCO), as well as a host of private companies, some with no prior dam-building experience, lured in by liberalization and generous governmental risk-reduction policies.16
The 1998 Policy on Hydro Power Development used climate science to justify dam projects: “Hydro power is a renewable economic, non polluting and environmentally benign source of energy. . . . Hydroelectric projects have long useful life extending over 50 years and help in conserving scarce fossil fuels.”17 Through 2008, the framing of hydroelectricity as a substitute for fossil fuels took on a more environmental tinge. The foreword to the report for Hydro Power Policy 2008 by Sushilkumar Shinde, the then union power minister, showcases this shift:
While on the one hand, we are under tremendous pressure for quick capacity addition, to meet the rising demand for power, on the other hand there is a global concern on the Green House Gas (GHG) emissions by coal based power plants. In the face of this, we have to make the most appropriate choice of technology and fuel. We are blessed with a vast hydro potential in the country. This environmentally benign source of energy is capable of providing clean and environment friendly energy at affordable rates.18
Shinde’s words were echoed in the same report by Jairam Ramesh, the then union minister of state for power.
By 2019, the idea of dams as a form of climate-friendly power had advanced further. That year, the government designated dams generating more than 25 megawatts of power as sources of renewable energy to facilitate their financing.19 Commentators in the Northeast speculated that the move was also intended to help achieve India’s nationally determined contribution to the Paris Agreement on climate change.20 Though no large dams have received green infrastructure financing yet, the state of Arunachal Pradesh has been successful in registering small hydroelectric plants for carbon credits.21
More than two decades after Vajpayee’s directive, only a few of the proposed projects have been completed. Many exist in a state of limbo, opposed not just by upstream populations but also by downstream communities all too aware that run-of-the-river projects often worsen water quality, produce siltation, and cause rivers to dry up.22 Other criticisms and pitfalls include inadequate environmental reviews, a lack of resettlement compensation, seismic risk, and generated electricity directed to faraway cities rather than development-hungry locals.23
Case Study: Climate Rhetoric and the Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Project
The opposition movement against LSHEP began in the tradition of environmentalism of the poor. As it has continued over the past two decades, activists have used climate science to argue that the dam does not make economic or ecological sense for either the nation or the inhabitants in the immediate vicinity of the dam and its effects. Through this rhetoric, a network of rural activists, nongovernmental organizations, and scientists working in Northeast India have demonstrated that climate science does not belong solely to elites, whether environmentalist or developmentalist. The invocation of scientific authority provided activists with additional legitimacy and an internationally legible vernacular in the struggle to assert local claims to resource use over those made by the state. In the process, the need for climate adaptation was integrated into arguments for locally driven development and resource-use decisions to form a novel kind of climate activism.
The need for climate adaptation was integrated into arguments for locally driven development and resource-use decisions to form a novel kind of climate activism.
LSHEP was proposed in the 1990s as a dam with hydropower, irrigation, and flood control components on the Subansiri River, the greatest of the Brahmaputra’s tributaries, near the Arunachal Pradesh–Assam border.24 By 2003, locals downstream in Assam had formed the Subansiri Bachao Samiti (Save Subansiri Committee) to oppose the dam. Environmentalists were concerned about legal violations in the dam’s planning, its implications for biodiversity, neglect of community consultations, and consequences for downstream river flow.
Protests took off in 2005, when construction on the dam officially began. The initial mobilizations focused on jobs, not the environment. Activists argued that the NHPC, the dam’s developer, was allocating too few jobs to locals in Lower Dhemaji district, a poorly connected part of Assam sandwiched between the north bank of the Brahmaputra and Arunachal Pradesh.25 But the tenor of the protests changed in 2008, a year of significant monsoon floods, to emphasize the dam’s safety risks and its consequences for downstream populations left out of the consultation process for the dam. Civil society organizations—the All Assam Students Union, Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti, Takam Mising Porin Kebang, and Asom Jatiyatabadi Yuba Chatra Parishad—and a political party, the Asom Gana Parishad, joined the opposition. In 2011, the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti sent a petition with 110,000 signatures on it to then prime minister Manmohan Singh to ask for a moratorium on dam building.26
Popular pressure produced short-term gains. Ramesh, by then minister of environment and forests, met with protesters. The central government shortly thereafter set up a committee to examine issues with the dam, and construction was halted in 2011. Even after this, though, opponents of the project and the government continued to put forward competing assessments—both asserting objectivity—of the dam’s vulnerability to earthquakes, impact on environmental conditions, and benefits for surrounding communities.27
The movement against LSHEP is a textbook example of activism in the tradition of environmentalism of the poor. Much of the opposition to the project came from local farmers and fishermen downstream of the project who feared the loss of their livelihoods because of the dam’s construction and who had not been included in consultations about the project despite the large, negative, downstream impacts of dams.28 They objected to the central government’s strong belief in the necessity of investing in hydroelectric power for development.
Much of the opposition to the project came from local farmers and fishermen downstream of the project who feared the loss of their livelihoods because of the dam’s construction.
The invocation of climate change to oppose LSHEP and mega dams broadly emerged around 2009 or 2010. The spread of these ideas was facilitated by a web of connections between both local and international nongovernmental organizations, scientists, journalists, and activists.29 These grew out of existing efforts to improve water management, protect tribal and customary rights in the Northeast, and manage development sustainably. Many of the participants in this network were highly locally rooted but conversant with an international community that shared their priorities around climate and environmental justice.
Costanza Rampini, an environmental scientist, has described the condition of riparian communities near dams in the Northeast as “double exposure.” Her work in Arunachal Pradesh finds that “dams along the Brahmaputra are worsening floods, reducing winter season flows, and increasing overall flow variability, hence compounding the impacts of climate change on river flows.”30 Residents of the riverbanks are highly sensitive to this, as journalist Snigdhendu Bhattacharya highlights in his reporting on the Northeast:
Hemanta Madhab Gogoi, a resident of Lakhimpur district and an activist of the Raijor Dal political party, said one of the reasons they are opposing the Lower Subansiri project is the changing rainfall pattern. “Heavy rains are coming in quick bursts following prolonged dry seasons. Droughts and floods have both increased. Playing with nature in this unpredictable period is like committing hara-kiri,” he said.31
Opposition to the dams, while certainly linked to issues around compensation and exploitation, is also deeply connected to the desire among rural populations for a stable relationship with the Brahmaputra and its tributaries. The already unpredictable rivers and the increasingly unpredictable rains are made even more difficult to prepare for by dam projects with limited parochial benefits and high-variance outcomes for farmers, including drought and flash floods. Access to climate science allows activists to link rural and agrarian concerns with the work being done to adapt to and mitigate climate change at the international level.
Access to climate science allows activists to link rural and agrarian concerns with the work being done to adapt to and mitigate climate change at the international level.
Connections between climate scientists and activists on the front lines allowed scientific arguments to be foregrounded in protest rhetoric. In 2010, climate scientist Partha J. Das, who leads water and climate research at the conservation nonprofit Aaranyak in the city of Guwahati in Assam, contributed a section on “The Hydropower–Climate Change Nexus” to a white paper on dams in the Northeast. The article warned of severe, negative consequences for adaptation from construction, pointing to the possibility that dams might exacerbate both water scarcity, as increasingly intermittent rainfall could end up trapped behind dam walls, and flash flooding, as outbursts could dump too much water for dams or land to absorb, forcing the release downstream of large volumes of high-velocity flow.32
Das was networked with activists such as Monoj Gogoi and K. K. Chatradhara—both from the town of Gogamukh, which is close to the site of LSHEP—through nongovernmental organizations such as the Rural Volunteer Centre, “a non-governmental and non-profit organization committed to fostering sustainable development and resilience among vulnerable communities.”33 These connections enabled the rapid uptake and sharing of information between urban and rural contexts, and between researchers and activists. Gogoi was among several interlocutors to point out to me that increasingly intermittent rainfall patterns cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were likely to make hydroelectric dam projects white elephants with far lower actual generation than their nameplate capacity—all while still cutting off the downstream from regular flows.34 From his perspective, “everything is linked to the Subansiri” in his part of Assam. Thus, the combined disruption of climate change and the dam project threatened fishermen, farmers, and riverbank communities alike.35
By the early 2010s, the effects of climate change appeared in activist writings on dams in the Northeast. A communiqué released by civil society groups from the states of Manipur, Meghalaya, and Assam after a 2014 Consultation on Dams and Climate Change in India’s North East criticized large dams on climate change–related grounds. The passage about LSHEP argued that:
The 2000 MW Lower Subansiri Dam will not only destroy forest areas in Arunachal Pradesh but also huge agriculture land in Assam. Destroying massive forest areas will only liberate colossal quantum of Green House Gases, viz, Carbon dioxide, Methane etc, responsible for climate change and crisis in the Earth’s atmosphere. The climate change implications of the submergence of agriculture land and forest areas by these mega dams has never been assessed.36
The communiqué made similar arguments about the Tipaimukh project in Manipur, and dam developers were criticized for seeking to receive carbon credits through the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism for their projects.
Chatradhara, who represented the People’s Movement for Subansiri Valley during the aforementioned consultation, has carried its message further. His work has linked the anti-dam movement to the perception of a water crisis centered on a more unpredictable riparian environment. In an interview with Assam Times, he said, “The water crisis in Northeast India is no longer a distant threat—it is happening right now. Our rivers are drying, floods are more destructive than ever, and communities are struggling for reliable water access. We cannot afford to wait any longer.”37 The message from groups such as his is that the region needs investment in climate-resilient infrastructure to withstand increasingly erratic rains and floods. Dams are too static and inflexible to form a part of this future.
By presenting dams as actively contrary to the goals of climate change mitigation and adaptation, activists, informed by climate science communicated through interlocutors including Das, have sought to foreclose the possibility of using the green transition to justify dam construction. Unlike anti-developmentalists focused on ecosystem health or biodiversity, they do so with a focus on the consequences of dam construction for both development and climate adaptation. Dams are presented as nonresilient infrastructure that hurt people’s ability to earn their livelihoods, jeopardize public safety by making flash flooding more likely, and remain economically infeasible because climate change may reduce the consistency of the flows of water they depend on.
Conclusion
After the National Democratic Alliance coalition, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, came to power in New Delhi in 2014 and in Assam in 2016, it slowly became clear that LSHEP would be completed.38 Activists turned to coalition-building. In 2019, Chatradhara and S. K. Chakraborty, a journalist from the city of Shillong in Meghalaya, convened the first North East India Water Talk (NEIWT). Envisioned as a platform for grassroots conversations about water-related issues in the Northeast, NEIWT represented an attempt to create a kind of broad, open civic space for important but underrecognized issues related to flooding, water scarcity, clean water, and dam construction.39
The most tangible product of NEIWT has been A Compendium of Water Stories from North-East India, a Heinrich Böll Stiftung–funded project that collects thirty essays about water from across the Northeast. The essays reflect the varied relationships and experiences of water that citizens of the Northeast have, such as the terror of the Brahmaputra in spate and the sacred relationship between local communities and water sources in the hills of the Shillong Range of Meghalaya. Contributors to NEIWT have linked the kinds of water crises experienced in the Northeast to climate change. When floods swept Tripura in 2024, Thomas Malsom, a NEIWT affiliate, wrote, “Tripura’s heavy rainfall is a testament to the ecological imbalance caused by anthropogenic activities, which has fuelled the state’s climate catastrophe. Tripura’s August downpour, which resulted in record-breaking flooding, serves as yet another warning sign of growing apprehension about future climate events.”40
NEIWT’s readiness to discuss both environmental and climate issues demonstrates a phenomenon that is occurring around the world but is especially clear in Northeast India: the gradual merger of the two issue categories as the conversation about climate change expands to be more inclusive of adaptation-related issues that are clearly connected to environmental justice. The example of the past decade shows how climate science can and does inform movements that stem from very different roots—in this case, the Indian tradition of the environmentalism of the poor. By accessing climate science and understanding the implications of climate change for local contexts and issues, activists are able to construct movements that are simultaneously local and integrated with international audiences and concerns.
In this series of articles, Carnegie scholars and contributors are analyzing varieties of climate activism from around the world, focusing on the intensification of activity both from the protesters themselves and from the authorities and forces who are the objects of their discontent.
Read more from the series here:
- Why Climate Sabotage Remains an Unlikely Strategy
- The Growing Criminalization of Climate and Environmental Protests
- In Iraq and Yemen, Climate Activism Requires Both Defiance and Adaptation
- Women and Climate Activism in Morocco and Tunisia
- Backlash Against Carbon Pricing in Australia and Canada
- Confronting Backlash Against Europe’s Green Transition
Notes
1Andrew Turner and H. Annamalai, “Climate Change and the South Asian Summer Monsoon,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1495, 587–595; and Rajashree Kotharkar and Aveek Ghosh, “Review of Heat Wave Studies and Related Urban Policies in South Asia,” Urban Climate 36 (2021): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2021.100777.
2Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, “The Loss and Damage Facility: A Step Towards Climate Justice,” UN Chronicle, December 9, 2022, https://www.un.org/en/un-chronicle/loss-and-damage-facility-step-towards-climate-justice; Navin Sreejith, “India’s Renewable Energy Capacity Achieves Historic Growth in FY 2024-25,” Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, April 10, 2025, https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2120729; Thomas Kerr and Farwa Aamer, “South Asia Rising to the Challenge: From Climate Vulnerability to Resilience,” World Bank Blogs, February 5, 2025, https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/endpovertyinsouthasia/south-asia-rising-to-the-challenge--from-climate-vulnerability-t; and “Meghalaya Focusing on Adaptation Strategies as It Revises Climate Action Plan,” Highland Post, July 15, 2024, https://highlandpost.com/meghalaya-focusing-on-adaptation-strategies-as-it-revises-climate-action-plan.
3“Policy on Hydro Power Development,” Government of India, Ministry of Power, August 1998, https://hperc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/hydro_power_policy_developmemt.pdf, 1; and R. Edward Grumbine and Maharaj K. Pandit, “Threats From India's Himalaya Dams,” Science 339, no. 6115 (January 2013): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1227211.
4Sharachchandra Lele, “Climate Change and the Indian Environmental Movement,” in Handbook of Climate Change and India, ed. Navroz Dubash (Earthscan, 2012): https://www.sustainablefutures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Navroz-Handbook-of-Climate-Change-and-India-Development-Politics-and-Governance-2011.pdf, 208–217.
5Shekhar Pathak, The Chipko Movement: A People's History (Orient Blackswan, 2020); and Lele, “Climate Change and the Indian Environmental Movement,” 211.
6Pradip Swarnakar, “Climate Change, Civil Society, and Social Movement in India,” in India in a Warming World: Integrating Climate Change and Development, ed. Navroz Dubash (Oxford University Press, 2019): https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199498734.003.0015, 253–272.
7Ranjit Dwivedi, “People’s Movements in Environmental Politics: A Critical Analysis of the Narmada Bachao Andolan in India,” Institute of Social Studies, Working Paper Series No. 242, March 1997, https://repub.eur.nl/pub/18981/wp242.pdf; Christian Erni, “Community Forest Governance: The Jharkhand Save the Forest Movement in India,” International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Briefing Paper, March 2011, https://www.iccaconsortium.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/example-jharkhand-save-the-forest-india-emi-2011-en.pdf; and Vidhya Das, “Minor Forest Produce and Rights of Tribals,” Economic and Political Weekly 31, no. 50 (December 1996): https://www.jstor.org/stable/4404874, 3227–3229.
8Subir Bhaumik, “Damming the Northeast,” The Caravan, September 30, 2010, https://caravanmagazine.in/perspectives/damming-northeast; and Dolly Kikon, Living with Oil and Coal (University of Washington Press, 2019).
9Sanjay Barbora, “Rethinking India’s Counter-Insurgency Campaign in North-East,” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 35 (September 2006): https://www.jstor.org/stable/4418651, 3805–3812.
10Jawaharlal Nehru, “Temples of the New Age,” from a Hindi speech delivered at the opening of the Nangal Canal, July 8, 1954, published in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches 3 (Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1958): 1–4.
11Ramananda Wangkheirakpam, “Lessons From Loktak,” Ecologist Asia 11, no. 1 (2003): https://subansiri.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ne-dams-ecologist-vol-11-no1.pdf, 19–24; and Swapan Kumar Patra, “Gumti Hydroelectric Project, Tripura, India,” Global Atlas of Environmental Justice, May, 2, 2022, https://ejatlas.org/print/gumti-hydroelectric-project-tripura-india.
12Grant Alan Burrier and Philip Hultquist, “Temples, Travesties, or Something Else? The Developmental State, Ecological Modernization, and Hydroelectric Dam Construction in India,” World Development 124 (December 2019): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104642.
13R. Rangachari et al., “Large Dams: India’s Experience,” World Commission on Dams, 2000, https://shekharsinghcollections.com/content/Dams/2000-Case-Study-Large-Dams-India_s-Experience-World-Commission-on-Dams.pdf, 29.
14Keith Schneider, “Big India Dam, Unfinished and Silent, Could be Tomb for Giant Hydropower Projects,” Circle of Blue, April 6, 2015, https://www.circleofblue.org/2015/water-energy/big-india-dam-unfinished-and-silent-could-be-tomb-for-giant-hydropower-projects.
15Manju Menon, “Infrastructure Development in the Northeast: Hydropower, Natural Resources, Legal and Institutional Frameworks and Compliance,” Heinrich Böll Stiftung, July 18, 2019, https://in.boell.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019/05/infrastructure_development_in_the_northeast_hydropower_natural_resources_legal_and_institutional_frameworks_and_compliance_.pdf, 2.
16Akhilesh Sati et al., “Growth of Hydropower in India: Role of the Private Sector,” Observer Research Foundation, June 24, 2022, https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/growth-of-hydropower-in-india.
17“Policy on Hydro Power Development,” 1.
18“Hydro Power Policy 2008,” Ministry of Power, Government of India, January 2008, https://www.ielrc.org/content/e0820.pdf, i-ii.
19“Cabinet Approves Modification of the Scheme of Budgetary Support for the Cost of Enabling Infrastructure for Hydro Electric Projects,” Press Information Bureau Delhi, September 11, 2024, https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2053886.
20Snigdhendu Bhattacharya, “India Pushes for Hydropower in Its Northeast Despite Environmental and Climate Concerns,” Earth Journalism Network, December 1, 2022, https://earthjournalism.net/stories/india-pushes-for-hydropower-in-its-northeast-in-spite-of-environmental-and-climate-concerns.
21Bikash Singh, “Arunachal: 98 small hydro projects registered for carbon credits under Universal Carbon Registration,” The Economic Times, November 6, 2023, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/energy/power/arunachal-98-small-hydro-projects-registered-for-carbon-credits-under-universal-carbon-registration/articleshow/105018955.cms?from=mdr.
22Menon, “Infrastructure Development,” 3, 5-6; Jaya Thakur, “India-Bangladesh Trans-Boundary River Management: Understanding the Tipaimukh Dam Controversy,” Observer Research Foundation, ORF Issue Brief No. 334, January 2020, https://www.orfonline.org/public/uploads/posts/pdf/20230510215230.pdf; and “Ranganadi HEP Renamed as Panyor Lower HEP to Honour Local Sentiments: CM,” Arunachal Observer, December 11, 2022, https://arunachalobserver.org/2022/12/11/ranganadi-hep-renamed-as-panyor-lower-hep-to-honour-local-sentiments-cm.
23Pallavi Hazarika, “Dams Do Not Mean Development: The Case of Hydro-Electric Projects in North East India,” Economic and Political Weekly (Engage) 55, no. 5 (February 2020): https://www.epw.in/sites/default/files/engage_pdf/2020/01/30/2965-1580382940.pdf, 1–9; Sanaton Laishram, “Consultation on Dams and Climate Change in India’s North East,” e-pao.net, November 19, 2014, https://www.e-pao.net/epSubPageExtractor.asp?src=news_section.press_release.press_release_2014.consultation_on_dams_and_climate_change_in_india_north_east_20141120; and Keshoba Krishna Chatradhara, “Who Pays the Price? The Human and Ecological Cost of Arunachal’s Mega Dams,” Assam Times, March 14, 2025, https://www.assamtimes.org/node/23359.
24Neeraj Vagholikar and M. Firoz Ahmed, “Tracking a Hydel Project,” Ecologist Asia 11, no. 1 (2003): https://subansiri.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ne-dams-ecologist-vol-11-no1.pdf, 25–32.
25Sanjib Baruah, “Whose River Is It Anyway? Political Economy of Hydropower in the Eastern Himalayas,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 29 (July 2012): https://www.jstor.org/stable/41720014, 41–52; and Pahi Saikia et al., “Contesting in the Policy Sphere: Stakeholders and Policy Formulation on the Lower Subansiri Dam in the Northeast,” India Review 22, no. 5 (2023): https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2023.2261316, 531–563.
26Raju Mimi, “Anti-Dam Protests Get Louder in Northeast India,” International Rivers, December 10, 2010, https://riverresourcehub.org/resources/anti-dam-protests-get-louder-in-northeast-india-1689.
27Saikia et al., “Contesting in the Policy Sphere.”
28Parag Jyoti Saikia, “How a Megadam Disrupts the Flow of Water—and Money,” Sapiens, January 30, 2025, https://www.sapiens.org/culture/india-hydropower-dam-impacts-river-communities; and Jatin Kalita et al., “Report on Downstream Impact Study of the Ongoing Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Power Project at Gerukamukh of National Hydroelectric Power Corporation Limited,” NHPC Ltd., 2010, https://cdn.downtoearth.org.in/dte/userfiles/images/NHPCL_Report.pdf.
29Author’s interview with Monoj Gogoi, June 4, 2023, Gogamukh; author’s interview with NGO employee, June 6, 2023, Guwahati; and Tuomas Ylä-Anttila and Pradip Swarnakar, “Crowding-In: How Indian Civil Society Organizations Began Mobilizing Around Climate Change,” British Journal of Sociology 68, no. 2 (June 2017): https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12251, 273–292.
30Costanza Rampini, “The ‘Double-Exposure’ of Riverine Communities in Northeast India to Dams and Climate Change,” Environmental Development 54 (June 2025):https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envdev.2025.101142, 1–13.
31Bhattacharya, “India Pushes for Hydropower.”
32Neeraj Vagholikar and Partha J. Das, “Damming Northeast India,” Kalpavriksh, Briefing Paper, November 2010, https://archive.nyu.edu/jspui/bitstream/2451/33859/2/dams-northeast.pdf.
33“Who We Are,” Rural Volunteer Centre, https://rvc.org.in/what-we-do.
34Author’s interview with Gogoi, June 4, 2023, Gogamukh.
35Author’s interview with Gogoi, June 4, 2023, Gogamukh.
36Laishram, “Consultation on Dams and Climate Change.”
37“Northeast Faces Water Crisis: NEIWT Calls for Urgent Action on Climate Resilience,” Assam Times, March 23, 2025, https://www.assamtimes.org/node/23363.
38Simantik Dowerah, “Lower Subansiri Hydro Electric Project: A Doom in the Downstream,” Firstpost, October 20, 2022, https://www.firstpost.com/opinion-news-expert-views-news-analysis-firstpost-viewpoint/lower-subansiri-hydro-electric-project-a-doom-in-the-downstream-11462411.html; and Ayanabha Banerjee, “Hydro Project Dries Up Subansiri River, Endangers Assam's Environment & Tribals,” Mooknayak, October 31, 2023, https://en.themooknayak.com/environment/hydro-project-dries-up-subansiri-river-endangers-assams-environment-tribals.
39K.K. Chatradhara, “Prologue,” in A Compendium of Water Stories from North-East India, eds. K.K. Chatradhara and S.K. Chakraborty (North-East Affected Area Development Society and Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2022).
40Thomas Malsom, “Unheard Voices of Climate-Induced Flood Disasters in Tripura,” North-East India Water Talks, March 12, 2025, https://newatertalk.in/blog/unheard-voices-of-climate-induced-flood-disasters-in-tripura.
