Hirakud Dam Was Opened on 13 January 1957 With a 4.8-Kilometre Main Dam, a 743-Square-Kilometre Reservoir, Irrigation in Four Districts and Flood Cover for 9,500 Square Kilometres of the Mahanadi Delta

Hirakud Dam closes the gap between two hills on the Mahanadi river, about 15 kilometres upstream of Sambalpur in Odisha. The main dam is 4,800 metres long, and with the earthen dykes that shut the low saddles beyond the hills the whole structure runs 25.8 kilometres, according to the Odisha Hydro Power Corporation (OHPC), the state company that runs its power houses. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru opened the project on 13 January 1957, and OHPC describes it as the first major multipurpose river valley project of independent India.

At full level the reservoir spreads over 743 square kilometres and collects water from a catchment of 83,400 square kilometres. OHPC credits the project with irrigation in four districts, flood protection for 9,500 square kilometres of the Mahanadi delta and two power houses. The same OHPC page puts the completed cost at Rs 100.02 crore in 1957. The first estimate, in 1947, was Rs 47.81 crore.

A plan written in 1947 for a river that flooded every year

The plan came from Dr A. N. Khosla, who became chairman of the Central Waterways, Irrigation and Navigation Commission in February 1945 and was asked to look at Odisha’s floods and droughts. A conference held at Cuttack on 8 November 1945, with B. R. Ambedkar, then the Labour Member of the Government of India, in the chair, agreed that the Mahanadi should be developed as a whole for flood control, irrigation, navigation and power. Both the Orissa Review of April 2005 and the Odisha Review of January 2014, magazines of the state government, record the meeting.

The thinking had started earlier. OHPC dates the Hirakud scheme to 1937, when Sir M. Visvesvaraya, whose career is in our piece on the engineer of the Krishna Raja Sagara dam, proposed detailed investigation of storage reservoirs in the basin after the floods of that year. The 2014 article adds that Odisha’s ministers met Gandhi in Calcutta on 29 October 1937 and, on his advice, engaged Visvesvaraya.

Khosla submitted his scheme in June 1947. It had three dams, at Hirakud, Tikarpara and Naraj, and he proposed to build Hirakud first. His report, as the 2005 article quotes it, said that less than 5 per cent of the river water was being put to use. It put the land destroyed by floods in the Mahanadi valley at about 3,70,000 acres (1,49,702 hectares) a year. For Hirakud he planned 3,50,000 kilowatts of power and a storage reservoir with room reserved for flood water.

A stone in 1946, another in April 1948

Sources disagree on when the foundation was laid. The Odisha Review article of 2014 cites a letter of 21 January 1946 in which Viceroy Wavell told the Secretary of State he would like Governor Sir Hawthorne Lewis to lay a foundation stone at Sambalpur before Lewis handed over the province at the end of March, and says Lewis did so that month. OHPC’s list of events gives the same: a foundation laying by Lewis in 1946. A PTI report from September 2025 agrees.

The second ceremony was Nehru’s. The Orissa Review of April 2007 says he visited Sambalpur on 12 April 1948 and laid the foundation of what it calls independent India’s first major river valley project. OHPC dates the foundation by Nehru to 13 April 1948. A chronology printed in the Orissa Review of November 2011 files the Lewis stone under 1951, a year that the other three sources do not support.

Work followed. OHPC lists preliminary design by the International Engineering Company of Denver, United States, between August 1948 and December 1949, and says construction of the project commenced in February 1949. The Orissa Review of 2005 says construction was “from 1948”. OHPC records a Hirakud Control Board appointed in March 1952 and a revised estimate of Rs 70.78 crore put to it in November 1953.

What is in the dam

OHPC calls it a composite structure of earth, concrete and masonry. Its tables give 18.1 million cubic metres of earthwork in the dam and 1.07 million cubic metres of concrete and masonry. The left dyke is 9,337 metres in five gaps and the right dyke 10,759 metres in one stretch. The reservoir stretches up to 83.2 kilometres at full level. OHPC says the dam was at one time the longest earth dam in the world.

The spillway, the structure that passes flood water, has 64 sluice gates (40 on the left side, 24 on the right) and 34 crest gates (21 on the left, 13 on the right). OHPC gives its capacity as 42,450 cubic metres a second. The 2017 note filed by the project authority for the additional spillway gives the same figure, 15 lakh cusecs in the units used by Indian water engineers, and adds that with a few gates out of use the effective figure is about 36,806 cubic metres a second.

Not every figure agrees across OHPC’s own pages. One table gives the maximum height as 60.96 metres and another 80.96 metres, so tuput does not print a height. The gross storage is listed as 8,136 million cubic metres in the original design and 5,896 million after revision.

Water in September, power in December, the ceremony in January

According to OHPC, the dam was completed in August 1956. Irrigation water was let into the right-side main canal on 7 September 1956, and the first generating unit, a 24 MW set at Burla, was commissioned on 18 December 1956. OHPC and the Orissa Review of 2007 both put the formal opening on 13 January 1957. The Orissa Review of 2005 says March 1957, the one source in this article that differs.

Nehru’s words, as recorded in the 2007 Orissa Review, were: “I dedicate this magnificent project to the well-being and prosperity of the people of Orissa.” The same account says he called Odisha a land of temples that now had a new temple, with a god for the whole country in it.

The project grew in stages, per OHPC. The Chiplima scheme, which sends the water on through a 26.72-kilometre power channel to a second power house about 30 kilometres from Sambalpur, was sanctioned in July 1956. Its three 24 MW units came on line between July 1962 and February 1964, and OHPC lists its inauguration on 14 September 1963. The seventh unit at Burla, of 37.5 MW, was commissioned on 13 September 1990. Nehru dedicated the Bhakra dam on the Sutlej on 22 October 1963, and it has its own account here.

What it delivers

On irrigation, OHPC gives 1,55,635 hectares in the kharif (monsoon-sown) season and 1,08,385 hectares in the rabi (winter-sown) season, across Sambalpur, Bargarh, Bolangir and Subarnapur districts. It adds that water released through the power house irrigates a further 4,36,000 hectares in the Mahanadi delta. The 2017 note, which lists Bargarh, Bolangir and Subarnapur, says 2,64,478 hectares a year.

On power, OHPC’s 2026 pages give 287.8 MW at Burla and 72 MW at Chiplima, a total of 359.8 MW. That is more than the 307.5 MW in the 2017 note. The OHPC unit ratings explain the gap: five original Burla units of 37.5 MW, two of 24 MW and three at Chiplima of 24 MW add up to 307.5 MW, and OHPC’s commissioning table records later uprating of several sets to higher outputs. This is tuput’s own arithmetic from OHPC’s tables, not a statement OHPC makes.

On flood control, OHPC says the project protects 9,500 square kilometres of delta in Cuttack and Puri districts. In September 2025 a Hirakud Dam official told PTI that gates had been opened during that year’s monsoon and that there was no flooding downstream despite good inflows. Tuput found no independent flood-by-flood record to cite.

The villages under the reservoir

The reservoir took farmland and homes, and the record on that begins before the dam. The Odisha Review of 2014 describes an agitation at Sambalpur in 1946 against the proposed dam. It records Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel writing to Premier H. K. Mahtab that considerable hardship was unavoidable, and that Congress members should not join the agitation. The state assembly adopted a resolution to carry out the recommendations of Khosla’s report on 28 August 1947, and the 2014 article describes the vote as unanimous.

On numbers, the Land Conflict Watch research group, citing the Central Water Commission’s feasibility report, says the plan estimated 168 villages and 1,35,000 acres under water, and that the reservoir took 325 villages and 1,83,000 acres. It gives 26,501 households. The India Water Portal says more than 360 villages and 26,561 families. These are secondary counts and they differ, and tuput found no single official total.

Rehabilitation has continued into recent years. On 2 September 2023 the Odisha government decided to give records of rights, the land titles known as pattas, to about 1,749 families displaced by Hirakud in Jharsuguda district, covering 3,231 acres in 19 villages, with distribution to begin in December 2023 in five villages. Land Conflict Watch records a distribution of pattas at Kurla village in Sambalpur district on 1 August 2024 and a final order from the National Human Rights Commission on 25 April 2023 asking the states to compensate and rehabilitate displaced people under the law.

A second spillway for a larger flood

The Central Water Commission (CWC) reassessed the dam’s inflow design flood in 1997 and arrived at 69,632 cubic metres a second (24.5 lakh cusecs), well above the spillway’s 42,450. The 2017 note says the CWC therefore advised additional spillways. A joint team from the CWC, the Egis consultancy and the World Bank visited in March 2015 and recommended two: five gates on the left bank to pass 3 lakh cusecs, and eight gates on the right dyke to pass 4 lakh cusecs. The first was to be taken up in the opening phase, with World Bank funding.

PTI reported on 9 March 2025 that a nine-member World Bank and CWC team had visited the site on 8 March, and that the proposed additional spillway would cost about Rs 884 crore, be 91 metres long and have five sluice gates. The report said two private companies assigned the work in 2019 withdrew in February 2020, citing delay in handing over the site. On 1 September 2025 PTI quoted Sudhir Kumar Sahu, Additional Chief Engineer of the Hirakud Dam Circle, as saying three major packages were under way: underwater treatment, the additional spillway and automation of the gates.

Sahu described the dam’s strength as “very good”, with superficial cracks and cavities upstream of the reservoir, and said reports from the Central Soil and Material Research Station and the Central Water and Power Research Station were positive. The most recent reports tuput could find are from September 2025, and the spillway’s completion date has not been announced.