A River That Refuses to Be Conquered: 19 Years After the ACT Movement, the Teesta Still Demands to Be Heard

Dr. JORDAN KINCHUM TSHERING NAMCHU

On 24 July, members of the Lepcha-led Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT) embarked on a four-day foot procession from Dzongu to the Teesta-Rangit confluence under the banner “Teesta Matters to Me.” The march is more than a commemoration of the nineteen years of one of the country’s longest-running Indigenous environmental movements. It is a reminder that the questions raised in 2007 remain unresolved. As hydropower projects continue to influence the ecological future of the Himalayas, the march revisits a simple yet profound concern: who gets to speak for the Teesta?

This question has its origins in the movement's earliest days. On 22 June 2007, two young Lepcha activists began an indefinite hunger strike in Gangtok against the proposed construction of hydel projects along the Teesta. They feared that the large-scale dams threatened the fragility of the river basin, including the Lepcha reserve of Dzongu. What began as a local protest soon evolved into one of contemporary India's most enduring community-led movements, bringing global attention to the socio-cultural, and ecological consequences of hydropower expansion in the Himalayas.

The march’s slogan encapsulates the sustained vision of the movement. Rather than treating the river as an energy repository, "Teesta Matters to Me" asserts a relationship of belonging and responsibility. For many Lepchas, the Teesta basin, and Dzongu in particular, is not merely a site for infrastructure projects. It is a sacred ancestral landscape deeply intertwined with the community’s collective identity and cultural memory. From its inception, the ACT movement, besides opposing hydroelectric projects, also challenged a developmental imagination that assessed the Teesta through the language of megawatts, and economic productivity. Against this vision, the ACT advanced an alternative understanding of the river as a biospheric and cultural lifeworld deserving protection in its own right.

The significance of this perspective has only grown. The glacial lake outburst flood triggered by the breach of South Lhonak Lake in October 2023 transformed the Teesta into a torrent of destruction. Settlements, highways, and bridges were washed away, dams were damaged, and lives were lost. The disaster exposed the vulnerabilities of a river basin that has become increasingly encumbered by hydropower infrastructure.

The Illusion of Mastering Nature

While the Teesta continues to demonstrate the limits of human control, the dominant paradigm of development remains largely unchanged. Modern notions of human advancement have long been animated by the belief that progress requires disciplining nature through technocratic measures. Rivers are to be leveed, mountains carved, and uncertainty minimised through engineering competence.

This logic has deep historical roots in South Asia. Colonial administrations regarded rivers as unruly forces requiring hydraulic control, while postcolonial governments elevated this worldview through the language of nation-building. Jawaharlal Nehru's description of dams as the "temples of modern India" captured an era in which technological mastery over nature became synonymous with progress. The Himalayas have long occupied a central place within this imagination, with hydroelectric policies portraying the region as a future powerhouse of clean energy. The Teesta, too, has been transformed into a site of resource extraction.

However, the mountains are not passive landscapes awaiting submission. They are dynamic systems shaped by tectonic instability, glacial processes, monsoon variability, and geomorphic disturbances. Ecological uncertainty in the Himalayas is not an anomaly but a defining condition of life. Attempts to impose predictability on such landscapes often generate new vulnerabilities. Large-scale dams, tunnels, roads, and railways may facilitate modernization and connectivity, but they also alter hydrological flows, destabilize slopes, and reshape relationships between communities and ecosystems.

The 2023 Teesta catastrophe was not simply an unforeseeable natural disaster. It reflected the cumulative risks produced by extensive human intervention alongside accelerating climate change. The flood served as a reminder of the fragility of the Himalayas and the limits of technological solutions.

What the ACT Movement Understood

The ACT has often been portrayed as anti-development. Yet such allegations overlook the substance of its arguments. Activists consistently raised apprehensions about seismic vulnerability, landslide risk, freshwater scarcity, habitat degradation, and the cumulative impacts of multiple infrastructure projects concentrated along a single river system. Their stewardship is rooted not in nostalgia but in the recognition that the ecological limits of the Himalayas could not simply be engineered away.

This year's march builds on these concerns. Alongside renewed efforts to scrap the Teesta Stage IV project, activists have advocated for the Teesta-Rongyong stretch to be declared a River Sanctuary and for fresh environmental impact assessments (EIAs) of existing hydel blueprints. These demands move beyond resistance and propose an alternative vision of river governance centred on ecological integrity and indigenous custodianship.

Equally important, the movement continues to resist the assumption that expertise belongs exclusively to engineers, consultants, and state agencies. Communities living within fragile environments possess biocultural knowledge developed through long-term engagement with rivers, forests, and mountains. As climate change intensifies extreme weather phenomena across the Himalayas, the warnings raised nineteen years ago appear remarkably prescient.

The Brahmaputra Board and the Politics of Scale

The recent inclusion of Sikkim and West Bengal in the Brahmaputra Board reflects the state’s growing recognition that rivers must be governed at the basin scale. However, governance is never merely a bureaucratic exercise. The expansion of institutional jurisdiction inevitably raises questions about power, participation, and representation. Who decides what constitutes sustainable development? Which voices are included in planning processes? What forms of knowledge are recognised as legitimate?

There is a risk that basin-scale governance could reproduce older patterns of centralization in which indigenous communities become objects of planning rather than participants in decision-making. The ACT march raises a broader political question about who has the authority over the Teesta. River governance often privileges technical expertise while marginalising the communities most directly affected by infrastructure projects. EIAs quantify biodiversity, sediment flows, and water discharge, but seldom account for rivers as living entities or acknowledge indigenous relationships with these ecosystems.

If the inclusion of two new member states within the Brahmaputra Board is to represent a genuinely progressive shift, it must move beyond the narrow technocentric management of water resources. It must create institutional spaces where indigenous knowledge, local experience, and ecological concerns are treated as central to river governance. Without this, integration risks becoming another name for extraction.

Beyond Resistance

The significance of the 2026 march lies precisely in how the movement has evolved. ACT is no longer only asking what should be stopped. It is increasingly articulating what should be protected, how rivers ought to be governed, and what models of growth remain compatible with theenvironmental complexities of the Himalayas.

“Teesta Matters to Me” is more than a campaign slogan. It is a challenge to reconsider modernity’s fantasy of complete control over nature. The Teesta cannot be reduced to a channel of water or measured solely through grid capacity. It is a living system embedded with ecological, and socio-cultural meanings. Policymakers must therefore take seriously the voices of communities whose concerns have long been dismissed as impediments to progress, even as they increasingly reveal critical insights about the landscapes they inhabit.

(Dr. Jordan Kinchum Tshering Namchu teaches Liberal Arts at CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru. Opinions shared in this article are personal. Email: jordan.kinchum@christuniversity.in)