Place · river dam · India
Hirakud Dam
Also known as Hirakud, Hirakud Dam, Mahanadi dam
Hirakud Dam across the Mahanadi upstream of Sambalpur, inaugurated by Nehru on 13 January 1957, is the longest earthen dam in the world at 25.8 kilometres including dykes. The project was announced within weeks of Independence as one of the first big multipurpose dams of the Nehru era — flood control for the Mahanadi delta that had drowned repeatedly in the colonial period, irrigation for the semi-arid western Odisha ryots, and 347 megawatts of hydropower to feed the Rourkela steel plant and the Hindustan Aeronautics plant at Sunabeda. It submerged 285 villages and displaced about 110,000 people; the compensation and resettlement is still a live political issue in western Odisha.
- Date
- 1947–1957
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Patron dynasty
- Government of India
- Confidence
- Established / referenced — The dam is established; the continuing dispute concerns displacement and resettlement, not the dam’s existence.
- Location
- 21.570, 83.870
Worth knowing
It submerged about two hundred and fifty villages and displaced some twenty-two thousand people, most of them Adivasi, and the resettlement is still contested seventy years later. The reservoir drowned the old temples of the valley; when the water is low in summer the spires of Padmaseni and others come back out of it, which is now a local season of its own.
Connections (3)
- AnalogueTelkupi
Hirakud on the Mahanadi drowned some two hundred and fifty villages and the temples of the upper valley in 1957; Panchet on the Damodar drowned the twenty temples of Telkupi two years later. Two of independent India's first river projects each took an architectural group, and in both cases the record is a salvage survey made just before the water rose.
- Imperial administration ofDamodar
Hirakud and the Damodar Valley Corporation were begun within a year of each other as the first multipurpose river projects of independent India, both modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority and both justified by a flood history. The Damodar was dammed upstream to hold water back, the Mahanadi across its main channel; both reservoirs have silted faster than designed.
- Site withinSambalpur
Hirakud Dam, inaugurated by Nehru on 13 January 1957, is built across the Mahanadi fifteen kilometres upstream of Sambalpur city — the historic capital of western Odisha under the Chauhans of Sambalpur, the headquarters of the modern district and the nearest railhead to the dam. The reservoir and the dam's administrative township fall within Sambalpur district. Sambalpur's ikat weaving, the Samaleswari temple of the Chauhan tutelary goddess and the Chiplima powerhouse of the Hirakud project are the layered sacred, royal and infrastructural landscape of the city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Hirakud Dam”. Odisha Water Resources Department project records; Balgovind Baboo, Technology and Social Transformation: The Case of the Hirakud Multi-Purpose Dam Project (1992).
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