Mainstream WeeklyKeywords : Damodar, Teesta, Jevons Paradox, Energy Economy, Sustainable Development, Hydroelectricity, DVC, Jharkhand, Sikkim
Jevons Paradox
Damodar and Teesta are two important rivers in eastern India, although they are from two very different eras and geographies of India. The Damodar rises from the ancient Chotanagpur Plateau and flows eastward across the Gangetic plains before joining the Hooghly River. The Teesta, in contrast, originates from the glacial mountains of the Himalayas, passes through deep mountain gorges before descending into the same Gangetic plains, before joining the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh. Together, these river basins are home to thirty million people, of whom twenty-five million live in the Damodar basin alone. Separated by geography and different ecology, these rivers nevertheless share a striking common destiny, both becoming central to India’s changing energy economy and modern development model.
In the eighteenth century, European capitalist colonialism initiated an unrestrained production- and consumerism-based economic system in India. This has profoundly transformed India’s society, economy, and natural environment. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx agreed that every process of production ultimately depends upon natural resources. Capital accumulation is fuelled by exploiting natural resources, while energy is required to convert natural resources into capital. In the nineteenth century, industrial capitalism in Britain was coal-driven. The British economist William Stanley Jevons, in his book The Coal Question, argued that greater efficiency in energy use paradoxically became "a curse," and was known as the Jevons Paradox. The central proposition of the Paradox is that the efficient use of energy or material resources does not necessarily reduce overall consumption; rather, it increases consumption. Greater efficiency often lowers costs, stimulates demand, and ultimately leads to a higher level of consumption. Although the paradox received little attention throughout the twentieth century, it resurfaced in recent decades in debates on climate change, sustainability, and environmental economics.
With the advancement of technology, energy use has become more efficient and instead of reducing overall consumption, it has expanded demand. Energy-efficient automobiles, household appliances, and efficient lighting technologies such as LEDs all consume less electricity or fuel per unit of use, and with the reduction of per-unit cost, people purchase and use them more. Therefore, Jevons Paradox applies not only to fossil fuels but equally to renewable sources of energy, including hydropower. It fundamentally challenges the assumption in sustainable development that technological efficiency ensures sustainability.
In the twenty-first century, rapid technological advancement has dramatically increased the efficiency with which energy and natural resources are utilised, and greater efficiency has encouraged higher levels of consumption. This process has generated two interrelated crises. On the one hand, the unchecked use of fossil fuels has intensified climate change and global warming, leading to frequent, destructive natural disasters. On the other hand, efficient production and high consumption lead to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few super-rich, creating economic inequality and placing contemporary civilisation under profound social and ecological stress.
The stories of the Damodar and the Teesta vividly illustrate how the Jevons Paradox operates in two different energy regimes. The Damodar represents the destructive legacy of fossil-fuel-based industrialisation, while the Teesta demonstrates that even renewable energy, when pursued within the same economic framework, can generate similar ecological and social crises.
The Coming of the Damodar
Damodar River originates from the Palamau region of Jharkhand, and flows for nearly six hundred kilometres before joining the Hooghly River, south of Kolkata. Over millions of years, the Damodar and its main tributary, the Barakar, together with their intricate network of countless streams and rivulets, shaped the Damodar basin in the Chotanagpur Plateau. Covered by dense tropical forests with rich biodiversity, the basin sustained innumerable plant and animal species. The archaeological remains of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods show it was the home to human communities from prehistoric times. For thousands of years, the forested Damodar basin has been the heartland of tribal civilisation, and Damodar was revered as a sacred river to them. In tribal languages, Damu signifies "sacred" while Da means "water." The ancient Buddhist and Jain archaeological remains here reflect the basin’s long and diverse cultural history.
The geomorphology of the basin made annual flooding in its lower reaches in the Ganges delta a natural phenomenon. During the monsoon, large volumes of water from Damodar’s vast, 17500 sq. kms, upper catchment descend rapidly into the narrow river valley of the lower basin, resulting in overflowing river banks and inundation of vast stretches of southern Bengal. For generations, these floods earned the Damodar the title "The Sorrow of Bengal." But the annual floods also deposit fertile alluvial sediments across the plains, creating one of India’s richest agricultural belts. The lower basin districts of Burdwan, Bankura, Hooghly, and Howrah became well known as Bengal’s granary. Damodar’s flood also performed another important ecological function; its powerful floodwaters flushed accumulated sediments from the mouth of the Hooghly River into the Bay of Bengal, which maintained the navigability of the Hooghly River. For a long time, Damodar played a vital role in maintaining the natural equilibrium of both the Chota Nagpur Plateau and the lower Gangetic delta.
But beneath the basin lay one of India’s richest deposits of coal and other minerals, the fuel of capitalism. The British had identified these reserves and its importance, and in the late eighteenth century, they opened India’s first commercial coal mine at Raniganj on the banks of the Damodar. For the next two and a half centuries, the valley supplied millions of tonnes of coal to the numerous industries. The history of coal mining in the Damodar Valley is inseparable from the history of industrialisation in India.
After mining began in Raniganj under the East India Company in 1774, it attracted European capitalists along with emerging Indian entrepreneurs like Prince Dwarkanath Tagore, who entered the coal business in 1837. In the early years, coal production and mining remained limited because the river was the only way to transport coal to Kolkata port through the inaccessible forested terrain. In the mid-nineteenth century, the situation changed dramatically with the expansion of the steam engine and the setting up of a railway network across India. With the expansion of railways, demand for coal increased exponentially, leading to the expansion of mining into new areas like Jharia and Giridih.
Vast dense tropical forests were cleared for mines, railway lines, roads, and new settlements. Raniganj evolved into the country’s principal coalfield, while Asansol emerged as the major railway and wagon terminal for coal transportation. Production rose sharply, from about 293,000 tonnes in 1858 to nearly 459,000 tonnes by 1868. With increase in mining the number of collieries increased dramatically from 37 in 1881 to 274 by 1908. Increasing steam engine efficiency, generated more demand for coal, and efficiency also lowered production costs, encouraged further industrial investment, and coal extraction intensified further. More investment started pouring into the sector at the beginning of the twentieth century; the Tatas acquired large mining leases in Jharia, Sijua, and Jamadoba to secure fuel supplies for their steel industry.
Large Coal reserves, abundant water, and proximity to Kolkata Port transformed the valley into India’s leading industrial zone. The country’s second integrated steel plant was established at Burnpur in 1918 on the banks of Damodar. Today, the Damodar Valley is India’s most important energy-producing area with nearly 46% of the country’s coal reserves. After the devastating flood of 1943, Kolkata was virtually cut off from the rest of India; a new era dawned in the Damodar Valley. Shortly after Independence, the Government of India established the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC) in 1948, modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority of the USA. It was the World Bank-funded first major multipurpose river valley project in Asia. The DVC was originally established with three primary objectives: Flood Control, Irrigation, and Power Generation. However, the rapid expansion of heavy industries in the Damodar valley at Bokaro, Durgapur, Burnpur, etc., with numerous ancillary industries, soon shifted its priorities. Supplying electricity to industry became the DVC’s main function, while flood control and irrigation became a lower priority.
The valley was an ideal place for thermal power generation, and DVC entered coal mining in 1951 by acquiring coal mines at Bermo in Bokaro to ensure a secure fuel supply for thermal power stations. Following the availability of cheap energy and water, more industries like steel plants, coal washeries, cement factories, chemical industries, coke oven plants, and engineering enterprises grew rapidly. Industrial cities such as Durgapur, Asansol, Chittaranjan, Kulti, Kumardubi, Dhanbad, and Bokaro expanded fast. The nationalisation of coal mines in 1973 and the creation of Coal India Limited (CIL) further accelerated this process. Through subsidiaries such as Eastern Coalfields Limited (ECL), Central Coalfields Limited (CCL), and Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), together with the DVC, coal extraction expanded on an unprecedented scale across the Damodar basin.
Today, more than 300 operational coal mines spread across 4,000 square kilometres (17% of the total basin area) produce over 200 million tonnes of coal annually. These mines are concentrated in seven major coalfields—Jharia, Raniganj, East Bokaro, West Bokaro, North Karanpura, South Karanpura, and Ramgarh. Once a densely forested landscape is now scarred with open-cast mines and piles of overburdens. Despite underground mining, nearly 60% of the valley’s coal production now comes from open-cast operations.
The Human and Ecological Cost of the Damodar Model
The history of natural disasters like the 1943 flood in the Damodar Valley was common, but the coal mines added a new dimension of manmade disasters in the valley. Mining disasters like Dhori in 1965, Chasnala in 1975 and Bhathdih in 2006 and many more, claimed hundreds of lives over decades. In spite of the DVC, recurring floods continue to inundate hundreds of villages across southern Bengal; severe winter air pollution in the Durgapur–Asansol industrial belt; the Jharia coalmines’ underground fire is nearly a century old and widespread land subsidence across the Raniganj coalfields are often viewed as separate incidents.
In reality, they represent different manifestations of a modern development model that has relentlessly extracted energy and natural resources from the Damodar basin without considering human cost. The first casualty of this development model was the vast tropical forest of the Damodar Valley.
Thousands of acres of dense forests were cleared, and today, forest cover survives at barely 22% of the total basin area, even though the state of Jharkhand has 29% forest cover. Along with the forests, an extraordinary wealth of biodiversity has disappeared in the Damodar basin.
The most tragic casualty was the indigenous Adivasi communities of the region. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the expanding colonial state, followed by the capitalist developmental policies of independent India, fundamentally altered the lives, livelihoods, and culture of the Adivasi peoples of the Damodar basin. The destruction of forests deprived them not only of their traditional means of livelihood but also of their cultural and spiritual space. Their relationship with nature, central to their economy, social institutions, and worldview, was systematically dismantled. The cultural hegemony of the upper caste, educated elites, gradually destroyed their economic, social, and political institutions. Communities that were once free and enjoyed considerable autonomy over their forests and natural resources transformed into marginalised populations living under the authority of the modern state.
A major casualty was the ecological balance of the Damodar river system and its archaeological sites. The construction of a series of large dams under the DVC not only reduced the annual flood threats but also reduced the annual minimum water flow to maintain the riparian ecology of the Damodar. While the dams initially succeeded in moderating monsoon floods, they also intercepted the natural vast volume of sediments, gradually reducing the capacity of the Dams. Over time, the river increasingly lost its capacity to flush accumulated silt from the Hooghly River Mouth, leading to the gradual decline of the navigability of one of eastern India’s most important waterways. Over the decades, DVC dams have now been filled up with piles of sediment, resulting in frequent release of reservoir water during excess rain in the upper catchment, causing unexpected floods in the lower basin area with high population density.
Ironically, while the main beneficiaries of this development are India’s expanding urban middle classes, business and educated elites, its costs were disproportionately borne by the tribal communities of the valley. Their lands were acquired without consent; their villages disappeared beneath mines, reservoirs, and industrial townships. The influx of migrants and the dominance of external political and cultural institutions gradually transformed the Adivasi communities into minorities in their own homeland. In 1953, the DVC acquired nearly 41,000 acres of land across the basin, largely owned and inhabited by Adivasi communities. Hundreds of villages disappeared beneath reservoir water and infrastructure, displacing nearly 70,000 Adivasi people. The expansion of coal mining proved even more devastating. Between 1950 and 1995, mining operations in the Damodar Valley displaced more than one million people, making it one of India’s largest and least acknowledged histories of development-induced displacement. Behind the statistics lies the irreversible loss of homes, agricultural land, forests, and sacred lands that had sustained generations of tribal families.
Today, the Damodar River is one of India’s most polluted rivers. The river and its tributaries function as drainage channels for hundreds of coal mines, towns and cities, numerous industries, and countless villages across the basin. Mine overburden, fly ash, oil, grease, coal dust, and toxic heavy metals enter the river system and pollute the water alongside untreated industrial effluents and municipal sewage. Air pollution has reached alarming levels, with suspended particulate matter, emissions from coal-fired industries, and dust from open-cast mines. This abysmal situation is the result of poorly regulated mining practices, inadequate maintenance, weak environmental safeguards, corruption, ineffective pollution-control institutions, and persistent governmental neglect. The failure of regulatory agencies to enforce environmental standards and citizens’ indifference have allowed ecological degradation to continue unchecked.
The Story from the Banks of the Teesta
The small Eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim is the origin of the Teesta River. Like Damodar, Teesta and its main tributary, Rangit, have created a vast upper catchment, and almost all of it lies within the Sikkim Himalayas. Here too, the lower basin in West Bengal and Bangladesh is relatively narrow, making seasonal flooding a natural phenomenon. For centuries, the Lepcha and Limbu communities made this mountainous region their homeland, and over time, Bhutia, Tibetan, and later Nepali communities joined them.
Unlike the Damodar Valley, however, the Teesta basin is free from the "resource curse", and the people of the Teesta basin lived over centuries with comparatively little external interference. Being in the young and dynamic Himalayan range, earthquakes, landslides, and periodic floods were part of life here, and communities adapted their livelihoods accordingly. Over millions of years, the Teesta basin nurtured one of the world’s richest ecological regions, the Eastern Himalayan Biodiversity Hotspot. Dense temperate and subtropical forests covered the mountain slopes, providing habitat for extraordinary biological diversity. More than 550 species of orchids and over 600 species of butterflies have been recorded here, alongside countless endemic plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects. The river was not merely a source of water; it was the ecological backbone of an exceptionally fragile mountain ecosystem.
From the end of the 20th century, global energy dynamics changed towards green energy, and along with this, the fate of the fast-flowing Teesta basin started changing. For centuries, the energy of fast-flowing Himalayan streams was used to cater to local needs; Sikkim also commissioned its first modest 50-kilowatt micro-hydel project near Gangtok as early as 1927, and the 2-megawatt-capacity second project was commissioned in 1965. Even after Sikkim became a state of the Indian Union, hydropower development remained modest; as late as 1978, the state’s three hydropower stations together generated only about 3 megawatts of electricity. The turning point came with India’s economic liberalization in the early 1990s. Advances in technology have made hydel electricity generation cheaper. During the same time, concern over climate change and the search for alternative renewable energy had dramatically increased. Hydropower was promoted as a source of "clean" and sustainable electricity while supporting economic growth. Within little more than three decades, the upper Teesta basin was transformed into one of India’s most important centres of hydropower development.
Large projects followed one another in rapid succession. The 510-megawatt Teesta Stage V project was commissioned in 2008, followed by the much larger 1,200-megawatt Teesta Stage III project at Chungthang in North Sikkim, commissioned in 2017. These projects symbolised a new phase in India’s transition towards renewable energy. According to official figures, around 32 hydropower projects of varying capacities have been commissioned across the Teesta and Rangit river systems in Sikkim and northern West Bengal. Several additional projects are under construction, while many more remain at the planning stage. The Central Electricity Authority estimated in 2024 that Sikkim possesses an economically exploitable hydropower potential of approximately 6,051 megawatts. Of this, around 2,282 megawatts had already been commissioned, 1,037 megawatts were under construction, and another 2,730 megawatts remained under various stages of planning.
Ironically, Sikkim itself consumes only a small fraction of the electricity generated here. Peak electricity demand in the state is estimated at merely 150–200 megawatts, well below its installed capacity. Most of the electricity produced is transmitted outside the state to supply national power grids. Sikkim Hydropower development has been driven less by local energy needs but to cater commercial electricity markets, corporate investment, and to generate revenues.
Technological advancement has made electricity generation more efficient, which has fuelled more generation for the energy market. Construction of larger dams and ambitious engineering projects is coming up in the seismically active Sikkim Himalaya, with tens-of-kilometres-long tunnels along the hill slope. Efficiency has expanded production, investment, and consumption rather than limiting them.
Climate Change, Hydropower and the Growing Fragility of the Teesta Basin
Every year, 18th September is observed in Sikkim as Disaster Preparedness Day, commemorating the devastating 6.9 magnitude earthquake of 2011. The earthquake caused devastating damage across the state; hundreds of buildings were damaged, and nearly 100 people lost their lives. Twelve years later, in October 2023, the Teesta basin experienced a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) that triggered a devastating flood in the Teesta from North Sikkim to the plains of North Bengal. Settlements along the river suffered unprecedented devastation, leaving around 100 people dead and causing enormous damage to infrastructure and livelihoods. Again, in May 2025, exceptionally heavy rainfall triggered widespread landslides across North Sikkim. The Teesta rose rapidly, claiming lives, disrupting transport, and inundating settlements between Rangpo and Melli. More than 1,500 tourists were stranded, while over 10,000 residents living along the river were directly affected. Numerous landslides in eastern and southern Sikkim further disrupted the national highway network, isolating large parts of the state.
These are all very recent incidents; earthquakes, landslides, and floods are not unusual in the Tista basin. They are intrinsic to the dynamic geology of the young Sikkim Himalaya, and climate change has added another layer of vulnerability. The question, therefore, is not why such disasters occur, but why they have become increasingly frequent, intense, and destructive in recent decades. A closer examination reveals a striking pattern. Excluding earthquakes, both landslides and floods have increased significantly during the same period in which large hydropower projects have proliferated across the Teesta basin.
The 2023 GLOF was similar to the recent devastating glacial flood disaster in Nepal. These are the clearest illustrations of how natural hazards can turn into a major disaster due to poor planning. It is well known from IPCC reports that with climate change, the glaciers in the Himalaya are melting at a high rate, and these melting waters accumulate in depressions, forming high-volume glacial lakes. Natural causes, such as ice avalanches and the collapse of a moraine dam in the lake, are the triggering factors for GLOFs. Similarly, on 4 October 2023, South Lhonak Lake breached, releasing an enormous volume of water into the upper reaches of the Teesta. This water first struck the 1,200-megawatt Teesta Stage III Project Dam at Chungthang with devastating force. The dam reservoir was nearly full when the flood struck, and as a result, the collapse of the dam released a huge volume of water downstream, dramatically amplifying the disaster. The flood wave then cascaded through a series of downstream hydropower installations, severely damaging Teesta Stage V, Teesta Stage VI, and the Teesta Low Dam III and IV projects in West Bengal.
The cumulative impact was catastrophic; more than 60,000 people were affected, over 100 lives were lost, large sections of the national highway were washed away, and numerous villages were isolated. The damage to hydropower infrastructure alone amounted to several thousand crore rupees. Even today, the scars of the disaster remain clearly visible along the river corridor between Chungthang and Gazoldoba. The disasters did not end there. In 2024, another major landslide destroyed the powerhouse of the Teesta Stage V project. Elsewhere, repeated slope failures forced entire Naga Nagamor villagers to abandon their homes. Hundreds of families continue to face an uncertain future.
These events have inevitably raised serious questions regarding the safety of large hydropower dams in the seismically active, fragile Teesta basin. Experts argue that the flood itself may have been unavoidable, but its destructive impact could have been substantially reduced through better planning. What is particularly disturbing is that the risks were not unknown. In 2015, two years before the commercial commissioning of the Teesta Stage III project, a study by the Central Water Commission identified the potential threat posed by GLOF in Teesta Stage III. Concerns regarding the vulnerability of the project had been raised as early as 2005. Nevertheless, neither the concerned authorities nor the project developers treated these warnings with the seriousness. The tragedy of the Teesta is therefore not simply the result of an unpredictable natural event. It is a story of a development model that underestimated the vulnerabilities of the Teesta basin. Today, three interconnected processes are making the future of the Teesta basin increasingly more vulnerable.
First, the Sikkim Himalaya forms part of a geologically young and tectonically active mountain chain. Continuous collision between the Indian and Eurasian plates places the region within Seismic Zone IV, making it highly vulnerable to earthquakes. Frequent micro-earthquakes indicate persistent tectonic activity, while destructive earthquakes such as the one experienced in 2011 demonstrate the possibility of even larger seismic events in the future.
Second, the steep and fragile mountain slopes are prone to landslides. During the last three decades, however, the construction of large hydropower projects and extensive tunnelling to increase their capacity, road widening, railway construction, and other major infrastructure works have further reduced slope stability. Combined with intense monsoon rainfall, these interventions have significantly increased the frequency and severity of landslides across the basin.
Third, climate change has induced a new hazard, the GLOF. The rapid formation and expansion of glacial lakes in the high Himalaya have greatly increased the risk of these events that were once extremely rare but are now emerging as one of the greatest long-term threats to Himalayan river basins. These three natural risks, tectonic instability, landslides, and climate-induced glacial floods, do not exist independently, and they are magnified now by the large dams and associated infrastructure.
For governments and investors, large hydropower projects represent profitable investments that promise clean energy, water security, climate mitigation, irrigation, and economic growth. But the same projects often bring ecological disruption, trigger natural disasters, social insecurity, repeated displacement, and the loss of lives and livelihoods. Extensive Teesta floodplain areas are inundated, and communities living in downstream plains are increasingly exposed to uncertain hazards completely out of their control. Hydropower, despite being promoted as a source of "green energy," remains one of the most controversial renewable energy technologies. Large dams require extensive construction, roads, tunnels, transmission corridors, and settlements, all of which generate significant greenhouse gas emissions during their construction and later. Moreover, vegetation submerged beneath reservoirs decomposes over time, releasing methane, a more potent greenhouse gas.
With increasing energy demand and the acceleration of climate change, the hydropower infrastructure expands simultaneously in the Teesta basin, and it is entering a period of profound ecological, social, and economic uncertainty and risk. The fundamental question, is this expansion truly driven by the imperative to reduce dependence on fossil fuels? Or is it, once again, the logic of capital accumulation that lies behind the relentless pursuit of ever greater energy production?
Looking Back: The Jevons Paradox and India’s Development Dilemma
The stories of the Damodar and the Teesta demonstrate the continuing relevance of the Jevons Paradox. The Damodar represents the devastating ecological consequences of an economy powered by fossil fuels, while the Teesta reveals that even renewable energy can produce similar outcomes when pursued within the same growth-oriented economic framework. In both river basins, energy production has expanded far beyond the requirements of local communities and is destroying the natural ecological capacities of the basins. The overriding objective has been to maximise production and feed an ever-growing energy market rather than to meet genuine human needs. Across India, the relentless pursuit of economic growth through ever-increasing energy production is placing immense pressure on the country’s forests, rivers, mountains, and agricultural fields. The developmental logic that reshaped the Damodar and Teesta basins is now being replicated in numerous river valleys and ecological regions throughout the country.
The central lesson of the Jevons Paradox is that technological efficiency alone cannot guarantee sustainability. Efficiency may reduce the energy required for a particular activity, but unless accompanied by restraint in production and consumption, they often encourage the destruction of natural resources. Under a neo-liberal economy driven by perpetual expansion, efficiency becomes a means of accelerating growth rather than reducing ecological pressure. Instead of asking how electricity can be used more wisely, public policy is largely preoccupied with how to generate more of it.
A recent study illustrates the scale of this expansion. India’s electricity consumption increased from 874 terawatt-hours in 2013–14 to approximately 1,623 terawatt-hours in 2023–24, almost doubling within a decade. Yet India’s per capita electricity consumption remains significantly below that of developed countries. Even at the present level of consumption, however, we are already witnessing the ecological consequences in river basins such as the Damodar and the Teesta. One cannot help wondering what the future holds if electricity generation continues to expand at the same pace.
References:
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(Author: Sujit Choudhury is a natural resource management and river basin management specialist associated with Integrated River Basin Management Society (IRBMS) | E-mail id: minervacal123[at]gmail.com )