The Bhakra Dam Rises 225.55 Metres From Its Deepest Foundation, Was Dedicated on 22 October 1963, and Supplies Sutlej Water to Three States and 1,415 Megawatts From Two Power Houses

Bhakra Dam on the Sutlej in Himachal Pradesh is a concrete straight gravity dam, 225.55 metres (740 feet) high above its deepest foundation and 167.64 metres (550 feet) above the river bed, according to the Bhakra Beas Management Board (BBMB), the body that runs it. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru dedicated the project to the nation on 22 October 1963. Its two power houses, Left Bank at 630 megawatts and Right Bank at 785, add up to 1,415 megawatts in the BBMB and Ministry of Power listings, and its reservoir, Gobind Sagar, feeds canals in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan.

A note from a river tour in 1908, and four decades of reports

The idea began as a note in a file. BBMB’s history of the project dates the first proposal for a storage reservoir on the Sutlej to 8 November 1908, when Sir Louis Dane named the Suni and Badu gorges as good sites for dams for storage and power. The Manthan Adhyayan Kendra, an independent research group, adds that Dane wrote it after a tour down the river from Shimla. A detailed report followed in March 1910. The cost was judged too high and the scheme was shelved.

Chief Engineer F. E. Gwyther revived it in a note of 20 February 1915, and the first full project report for a high dam at Bhakra came in 1919. It planned a dam 120.40 metres (395 feet) high that would store 3,182 million cubic metres of water, for irrigation only, with no power station. BBMB says it was set aside in favour of the Sutlej Valley Project, which was sanctioned the same year.

An expert committee that visited the site in November 1927 recommended a dam 152.40 metres (500 feet) high. In 1939 A. N. Khosla, then Superintending Engineer, prepared a detailed report for a dam of that height, and BBMB says it was the first to provide for hydroelectric power: four units of 40 megawatts and a fifth auxiliary unit.

The 1940s moved the plan from paper to rock. In 1944 the Punjab Government asked Dr J. L. Savage, chief engineer of the United States Bureau of Reclamation, to examine the site, and he found it suitable. From 1945 to 1947 the geologist F. A. Nickell supervised core drilling that put down 58 holes totalling about 2,133 metres. A draft agreement of 1945 between the Punjab Government and the Raja of Bilaspur held the reservoir level at 1,580 feet, because a higher level would drown Bilaspur town. Designs prepared in 1945 and 1946 by an engineering firm in Denver provided for 150 megawatts of firm power.

In 1948 the partitioned Punjab needed more irrigation and power, and the limit was reviewed. BBMB records the decision to build to the maximum safe height that the foundation rock allowed, with a full reservoir level of 1,680 feet, later 1,685. Revised designs were ordered from International Company Inc. of the United States under an agreement of 14 November 1948.

Canals first, then the dam, 1948 to 1963

BBMB’s brochure says Punjab and Rajasthan collaborated in building the project from 1948, and that the Government of India set up the Bhakra Control Board in 1950 under the chairmanship of the Governor of Punjab. The site was remote. The railhead stopped at Ropar, about 60 kilometres from Nangal, and BBMB says there was hardly a road.

Two decisions shaped the order of work, according to BBMB’s history. The canal system would be built before the dam, and the dam would be built departmentally, by Indian engineers of the irrigation department, with foreign experts. Full-scale construction began after April 1952, when M. Harvey Slocum arrived from the United States with a team of construction engineers. The Tribune reported in 2013 that funds had been provided in the 1946 to 1947 budget, that Partition then left Punjab only a fraction of its irrigation (a former civil officer, Pritam Singh Kumedan, put it at 15 to 20 per cent), and that the canals were therefore given priority.

The canals came first. Nangal Dam, 13 kilometres downstream of Bhakra, was commissioned in 1954 to turn Sutlej water into the 61.06-kilometre Nangal Hydel Channel, which carries up to 12,500 cusecs (cubic feet per second). Two power houses on that channel, Ganguwal and Kotla, began generating in 1955 and 1956. BBMB says Nehru inaugurated the Bhakra canal system on 7 July 1954, and the Tribune reports that he laid the first bucket of concrete for the dam on 17 November 1955.

The first generating unit on the Left Bank was commissioned on 14 November 1960, and all five were running by 10 December 1961, BBMB’s table shows. Slocum died of a cardiac arrest on 11 November 1961, as the Tribune reports. Nehru dedicated the dam on 22 October 1963, and BBMB says he had visited the project 10 times during construction (the Tribune in 2013 said about 13). The five Right Bank units followed between May 1966 and December 1968. Together the ten units were first rated at 1,050 megawatts.

What the board lists for the dam, the reservoir and the power houses

BBMB’s brochure gives the length of the dam at the top as 1,700 feet (about 518 metres). The reservoir covers 168.35 square kilometres. For storage, BBMB’s documents give a gross capacity of 9,621 million cubic metres, and its specification table gives 7,551 million cubic metres at the normal full level of 1,680 feet.

Each Left Bank unit is rated at 126 megawatts and each Right Bank unit at 157, driven by vertical-shaft Francis turbines. The ratings were raised from the original 90 and 120 megawatts as units were renovated, and BBMB’s page lists 630 and 785 megawatts. The Ministry of Power’s reply in the Rajya Sabha on 29 July 2024 lists the same two figures, with Dehar at 990 and Pong at 396, for a BBMB total of 2,801 megawatts in Himachal Pradesh. An older BBMB brochure gives the Bhakra total as 1,379 megawatts, with the Left Bank at 594, from before the uprating of its units was complete.

What Nehru said in 1954 and in 1963

The English text of Nehru’s Hindi speech at Nangal in July 1954, when the canal system opened, shows the dam still unbuilt. He called what was finished only half the work, and said the water would irrigate large parts of Punjab, PEPSU and Rajasthan and the deserts of Rajasthan, while the power would run thousands of factories and cottage industries. He recalled that an Englishman had first had the idea about fifty years earlier. Of the site he said: “the biggest temple and mosque and gurdwara is the place where man works for the good of mankind.”

The sentence about resurgent India is later. The Manthan study dates it to the dedication on 22 October 1963: “Bhakra, the new temple of resurgent India, is the symbol of India’s progress.” BBMB’s history page carries the line without a date, and the Tribune in 2023 places it at the 1963 dedication.

The Board that shares the water and the power

The Bhakra Management Board was constituted under Section 79 of the Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966, and took over the administration, maintenance and operation of the Bhakra Nangal Project from 1 October 1967. It became the Bhakra Beas Management Board on 15 May 1976, when the Beas works were transferred to it. The Board has a chairman and two whole-time members appointed by the Government of India, one representative each of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh, and two from the Government of India, for Power and for Water Resources.

The Indus Waters Treaty, signed at Karachi on 19 September 1960, gave India the three eastern rivers, the Sutlej, Beas and Ravi. BBMB’s brochure says Sutlej water was first divided between Punjab and Rajasthan under the Bhakra Nangal agreement of 1959 and among the successor states after 1966. Its table now gives Punjab 57.88 per cent, Haryana 32.31 per cent and Rajasthan 9.81 per cent, with monthly releases decided by a technical committee of the partner states’ representatives.

Power is shared more widely. Under a Ministry of Power notification of 31 October 2011, the Bhakra share since 1 November 2011 is Punjab 43.91 per cent, Haryana 31.80, Rajasthan 15.22, Himachal Pradesh 6.10 and Chandigarh 2.97, in BBMB’s table. Across its power stations the Board reports 11,198 million units generated in 2025-26, about 18 per cent above their annual design energy of 9,515 million units, from stations aged 43 to 72 years.

What the canals did for farms in three states

BBMB says its projects together supply about 34,000 million cubic metres of water a year and irrigate 135 lakh acres (13.5 million acres), which it puts at 8 per cent of the country’s irrigable area. That total covers the Bhakra and Beas projects together. The Manthan study, drawing on BBMB’s 1988 figures and its own estimates, gives the Bhakra gross command area at 2.68 million hectares, split 49 per cent to Haryana, 35 per cent to Punjab and 16 per cent to Rajasthan, and cites a 1973 source for planned annual irrigation of 1.46 million hectares.

On the older canals, the Tribune reported in 2013 that the Ropar head regulator was rebuilt to carry 12,625 cusecs, up from about 9,000, and that the Sirhind Canal, which used to dry up in winter, became perennial. It gave the area under paddy as 2.27 lakh hectares in undivided Punjab in 1960 to 1961 and 11.83 lakh hectares in reorganised Punjab in 1980 to 1981, and repeated BBMB’s claim that 128 towns and 13,000 villages were electrified.

BBMB’s brochure calls its projects a harbinger of the Green, White and Yellow revolutions. The seed and policy side of the Green Revolution is in our piece on M. S. Swaminathan and the Green Revolution. On the water side, the Manthan study estimates that Bhakra’s canals account for about 11 per cent of Punjab’s foodgrain production and about 24 per cent of Haryana’s, and concludes that tubewell groundwater did more to drive the Green Revolution than canal water. The Tribune set out both views in 2013. Water sharing between states more generally is covered in how India settles river water disputes.

The people of Bilaspur and the 371 villages

The reservoir needed land. BBMB’s 2002 status note, as quoted in the Manthan study, records 44,153 acres submerged (about 178.75 square kilometres, against the 168.35 square kilometres BBMB gives for the reservoir area on its dam page), 371 villages displaced and 7,206 landowning families, about 36,000 people. Of those families, 2,395 were settled by the Himachal Pradesh government in its own area, 2,632 took cash compensation and resettled by choice, and 2,179 were given land in the Hissar canal command, where about 13,200 acres were acquired in 30 villages. The Tribune in 2013 reported a different count from critics of the project, 36,000 families from 446 villages. This article gives each figure as attributed.

Old Bilaspur, the capital of the Raja’s state, was submerged. The Manthan study puts the number affected at about 4,000. A new town was built on the adjoining slopes and settled from 1954, and each family was allotted a plot. The Manthan study, citing a report by the group SANDRP, records that the state’s rehabilitation committee declared the process complete in 1983, and that a review in 1999 of 3,000 further applications found 787 valid, with 153 families promised land.

What the board is studying now

BBMB’s 2025 to 2026 achievements page says the Bhakra and Pong reservoirs have lost about 26 per cent and 13 per cent of their gross capacity to silt. In 2025 to 2026 it surveyed silt across the whole reservoir with an echo sounder and GPS for the first time.

On 11 March 2026 experts from Roorkee, the National Dam Safety Authority and BBMB officers met to discuss an increasing trend of deflection in Bhakra Dam since 1995. They decided on a detailed study of the cause, and BBMB said it was engaging IIT Roorkee for that work.