The Sharavathi pumped storage project has entered a fresh stage of environmental scrutiny after a citizens’ independent expert committee submitted a 55-page report to the National Board for Wildlife, urging it to reject a separate assessment by the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) and deny approval for the proposed 2,000 MW project. The dispute is not simply over one report. It exposes a larger question in infrastructure planning: how should India weigh electricity requirements against ecological and geological risks when a major project is proposed inside a sensitive wildlife landscape?
According to a report by Prajavani, Anant Hegde Ashisara, a member of the citizens’ committee, said the NIAS assessment was one-sided and contained incorrect information. The committee alleges that the report moved beyond an impartial review and adopted a position favourable to the project being pursued by Karnataka Power Corporation Limited, or KPCL. These are allegations made by the citizens’ committee; the material supplied for this report does not include a response from NIAS, KPCL or the National Board for Wildlife.
The proposed facility is described as a 2,000 MW pumped storage project in the Sharavathi Valley wildlife area. Pumped storage projects generally rely on two water reservoirs at different elevations: electricity is used to move water upwards when demand is lower, and the stored water is released through turbines when demand rises. In this case, however, the public controversy is centred not on the basic operating principle but on the location, construction requirements and ecological consequences of the proposed installation.
The conflict before the wildlife authorities has been shaped by two different expert assessments. The committee said an earlier review led by H.S. Singh had identified risks including extensive biodiversity loss, deforestation, threats to wildlife and landslide hazards, and had recommended that the project not receive approval. The citizens’ committee now contends that the NIAS report, which was commissioned to examine the earlier assessment, reached a conclusion favourable to implementation instead of providing an independent evaluation.
That difference is significant because environmental decision-making depends not only on the presence of expert reports but also on the scope and independence of the questions they address. A review can become contentious when one side believes that it has assessed the project’s necessity while the other believes that it was asked to examine ecological and technical risks. The supplied report says the citizens’ committee has objected to what it describes as NIAS’s argument that electricity shortages make the project necessary, claiming that this went beyond the institution’s assigned responsibility.
The central institutional issue is therefore the separation between project justification and project impact assessment. Whether a state needs additional electricity is one question. Whether a specific project should be located within a wildlife area is another. The committee argues that the NIAS report did not adequately explain why the project had to be located in the Sharavathi sanctuary or wildlife landscape, rather than being considered at another site. The supplied material does not establish what alternative locations were studied, whether a formal alternatives assessment was conducted, or what criteria were used to compare them.
The committee has also identified several technical issues that it says were missing from the NIAS assessment. These include the impacts of large tunnels, the construction of an underground power station, changes to groundwater levels and the risk of landslides. These concerns are particularly important because pumped storage infrastructure can involve substantial excavation and underground works, even when the visible project footprint does not fully represent the extent of construction activity.
The distinction between visible land acquisition and the total construction footprint matters in forested and wildlife-rich areas. Roads, access routes, work sites, tunnel portals, spoil disposal areas, transmission infrastructure and underground excavation can each affect habitat and local environmental conditions. The supplied report does not provide the project’s detailed layout, tunnel length, land requirement, construction schedule or transmission plan. Those omissions prevent an independent assessment of the scale of the proposed intervention based on the available material alone.
The citizens’ committee’s submission also raises a governance question about how competing expert opinions should be handled. The earlier H.S. Singh-led committee is described as having recommended against approval because of ecological and geological risks. The NIAS report, according to the citizens’ committee, took a more favourable view of implementation. When assessments reach different conclusions, the credibility of the decision-making process depends on whether the underlying assumptions, methods, data and terms of reference are publicly available and comparable.
The National Board for Wildlife is the authority to which the two positions have now been presented, according to the report. The citizens’ committee has asked the board to reject the NIAS report and withhold approval for the project. The supplied material does not state when the board will consider the submission, whether it has sought further information, or what stage the project’s statutory clearance process has reached.
The disagreement also places energy planning and conservation policy in direct contact. The committee says NIAS argued that the project was needed because the country faces an electricity shortage. The committee’s response is that a broad energy requirement cannot by itself establish the suitability of a particular ecologically sensitive site. For public institutions, this distinction requires a transparent chain of reasoning: the energy service required, the available technologies, the candidate locations, the comparative environmental impacts and the safeguards that would apply to each option.
No such comparative evidence is included in the supplied report. There are no figures on the state’s electricity demand, storage requirement, renewable energy integration, expected generation profile or the project’s estimated cost. There is also no information about the project’s construction duration, expected operating cycle or projected benefits to the wider power system. These are not minor details. They determine whether the claimed energy benefit can be weighed against the ecological and social costs of the selected location.
The issue is especially relevant because pumped storage is often presented as an energy storage solution rather than only as a conventional generation project. That description can influence how projects are evaluated, but it does not remove the need to examine land, water, forest, wildlife and geological impacts. In the Sharavathi case, the citizens’ committee says the assessment failed to discuss both the project’s environmental risks and conventional or alternative options. The available material does not independently verify that allegation, but it clearly identifies the questions that the committee wants the wildlife authority to answer.
The public response described by Prajavani has included an email campaign by environmental groups and members of the public to the Union environment ministry. This indicates that the dispute has moved beyond a technical exchange between expert bodies and has become a wider public issue concerning the future of the Sharavathi landscape. The report does not provide the number of participants, the contents of the communications or any response from the ministry.
The committee includes environmental experts, scientists, a former Karnataka Biodiversity Board chairperson and retired Justice Gopal Gowda, among others. The identities listed in the report establish the composition claimed by the committee, but they do not by themselves settle the technical disagreement. The relevant question for the approval process is whether the committee’s findings and the NIAS assessment can be tested against the same project documents, field data and environmental criteria.
The Sharavathi controversy therefore illustrates a recurring challenge in urban and infrastructure governance: the need to evaluate large projects as systems rather than as isolated engineering proposals. A project can serve a state or national electricity objective while still raising serious questions about location, construction method and ecological risk. Conversely, objections to a project need to be examined through verifiable data rather than accepted solely because they come from a public-interest group.
What the available evidence confirms is that the proposed 2,000 MW project faces a formal challenge before the National Board for Wildlife and that two expert positions have been presented as substantially different. What remains unestablished is the full content of the NIAS report, the detailed findings of the H.S. Singh-led review, the project’s exact environmental footprint, the alternatives considered and the official response of KPCL, NIAS, the environment ministry and the wildlife board. Those documents and the board’s next decision will determine whether the current dispute becomes a request for further study or a direct obstacle to the project’s approval.
