14 February 2026
The Tamor River, or Imbiri Yanghang in the Limbu language, is a crown jewel of Nepal’s far-eastern hills. Fed by glaciers from the Kanchenjunga (Seselungma in Limbu) region, this fast-running river nourishes humans and other species while crisscrossing the sacred sites of the Limbu and other indigenous communities. Trekkers en route to Kanchenjunga via Olangchungola and Gola glimpse this living landscape. Yet, as Nepal taps its rivers as ‘natural resources’, the Tamorfaces irreversible ecological alterations and the loss of its aesthetic and spiritual grandeur.
Nepal’s drive to harness its natural resources—especially its rivers—for public-centred development is strategic and imperative. But I stress needs-based development because it is rooted in ethical concerns, collective wellbeing, and a shared life instinct to sustain and create (what Freud called Eros). In contrast, want-driven development awakens and amplifies limitless desires, guided by the death instinct (Thanatos). When Thanatos dominates, development becomes a pursuit of acquisition and control, often enforced through self-serving and undemocratic means, whereas needs-based development is propelled by cooperation, life, and survival.
While no society can operate purely on one instinct or the other; their balance is essential for sustainable progress. Crucially, framing development around local needs and aspirations is not only ethical—it is necessary. Nepal, like other so-called ‘developing’ nations, has the opportunity to chart a different course, one free from the environmentally destructive patterns of past Western industrialisation.
Hydro-led development and its paradoxes
Hydropower-led ‘green’ development in Nepal is a paradox woven into its social, political, and economic life, all shaped by long histories of inequality. In contemporary Nepal, the aspiration to be wealthier, better educated, more mobile, and more influential is widely shared—no longer confined to a small elite. These aspirations reveal that Nepal’s pursuit of hydro-led development is not a narrow, localised project; it is entangled with broader global patterns of development, shifting notions of climate responsibility, and the deeply contested ethics of progress. These aspirations generate profound contradictions.
Nowhere are these tensions starker than in the lives of Nepal’s vast indigenous communities. Here, the promise of development clashes with the fear of erasure: the loss of history and identity, the threat of displacement, and the constant pressure—or prosecution—by the state. And yet, intertwined with these fears is a fierce determination: a sustained fight for equity, justice, and prosperity that refuses to be silenced.
Take the Tamor River as an example. On the Tamor, there are 11 hydro projects currently under construction within Taplejung district itself, and one is already connected to the national grid. The ecological, economic, and social impacts of these hydro projects are difficult to fathom, not because the financiers and companies did not carry out the environmental impact assessments (EIAs), but because such reports have repeatedly proved to be merely minimal, bureaucratic exercises toward project initiation. Yet investors in Nepal—including the government—continue exploiting the Tamor and the country’s more than 600 downstream rivers as pillars of a hydro-led future, even as that future risks hollowing out the ecological and cultural foundations that have sustained these places for generations.
Nepalis pursue greater prosperity—a desire born of local precarity but entangled with transnational forces in an inter-connected world. Caught in hydro-led development paradoxes are indigenous communities—economically entangled in capitalism and participating in a society that celebrates wealth accumulation while also seeking to preserve their indigenous histories, cultures, and roots.
Along this paradoxical fault line, Nepal’s march toward green development unfolds—a landscape of rivers where the promise of progress casts long shadows. In countless grand projects, indigenous communities—bound by kinship, language, and land—often find themselves pulled in opposite directions by competing futures. Onlookers often reduce these tensions to caricatures: rival factions manipulated by elites or victims of divide-and-rule. A deeper truth lies beneath: these are not mere quarrels but are the anguished echoes of a people pressed between two paradoxical worlds: to weave themselves further into the logic of capital or to remain stewards of ancestral soils and keepers of an ecological and spiritual inheritance older than the nations that now claim their lands.
For them, life is not a simple binary. Those I met in the valley and highlands of the Tamor—whether drawn toward contracts and compensation or rooted in customary ways—spoke of the same unbearable ache. They know each road cut by bulldozers is an incision into memory, every tunnel in sacred mountains a wound in the land’s soul. Every hydroelectric dam and powerhouse rises not just as steel and concrete but as a monument to erasure—unmooring them from rivers that are the lifeblood and myth, severing identity from every ridge and stream. In this relentless unfolding, they feel what it means to ‘unbecome’: to watch culture leak away like water from cracked stone until land, language, and lineage slip beyond reach.
On my recent trip to Faktanglung Gaupalika, I passed five hydro projects under construction on the Tamor: i) Tamor–5 (37.5 MW), ii) Upper Tamor (285 MW), iii) Super Tamor (166 MW), iv) Tamor Hydropower (43 MW), and v) Upper Tamor ‘A’ (60 MW). I spent a week understanding the dynamics of the Upper Tamor project. This USD 38 million (NPR 55 billion) investment is set to be completed by 2028. The company completed its EIA in 2018 and finalised the electricity purchase and sale agreement with the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) in 2023, following which construction began in 2024.
The project spans across Phaktanglung Rural Municipality, wards 1–6 (the former Tapethok, Lelep, and Lingkhim VDCs). Key infrastructure, such as headworks and the powerhouse, is in Tapethok, while the tailrace tunnel and the main connection to the national grid are in Lingkhim. Below, I highlight some key dynamics I observed at Tapethok, the main powerhouse construction site.
According to Kishor Limbu, an activist in his late 40s, the construction site was once one of the most fertile rice fields in Tapethok, spreading across more than five hundred ropanis of land. About half a kilometre above the powerhouse lies a sacred site of the Limbu community: Tagera Ningwafu Mang Fuko, a cave where the creator of the world is said to have meditated and vanished.
Now, excavators roar as they raze and level the once-rich rice fields along the Tamor riverbank. ‘All finished,’ says Dan Bahadur Limbu, over 80 years old, who sold his rice field to the company. His voice resonates with a complex chord of emotions—relief, ambivalence, and remorse, all intertwined.
On the one hand, he is glad to have sold the land, for he no longer has the strength or help to farm. On the other, he knows that the rice field passed down through generations is gone forever. His memories of sowing and reaping with his grandparents, kinsfolk, and neighbours—memories once rooted deep in this soil—are destined to be buried beneath the powerhouse in the coming years.
Dan Bahadur’s mix of remorse and relief—his conflicted attachment to the land—embodies the development paradox villagers in Tapethok are living through.
At a basic level, development is necessary. The hydro project may indeed have been needed. It brought a road and transformed mobility. Where villagers once spent a day or two reaching the Taplejung district headquarters for basic goods and services, they now make the trip twice in a single day. Local products, especially large cardamom, can now be transported directly to market, cutting out middlemen and their profits.
But this form of development carries profound costs, difficult to grasp—such is the speed and force of change in rural lives. These costs extend into political, cultural, historical, and social realms. Tangsang Tamaden Limbu, in his mid-thirties, brings this into sharper focus, echoing and expanding on Dan Bahadur’s experience.
That morning, over tea at Kishor Limbu’s house, the distant thunder of machines smashing rock at the powerhouse accompanied our words. Tangsang joined us, his face drawn, and suddenly raised both thumbs—as if offering them up—and said with quiet resolve, ‘I may just simply cut them off.’
I blinked in disbelief. ‘Why would you do that?’
His voice was soft but fierce: ‘Then I won’t have thumbs to give my fingerprints if I have to sell my land to the [Upper Tamor] company.’
I leaned in. ‘Do you have to sell?’
Tangsang spoke then of Hang Limbu, his distant cousin in his early thirties, appointed as the public relations office (PRO) by the company. But in the village, people whisper that this PR role is one to pressure and convince those who refuse to sell, threatening that if they refuse or resist, the government will take their land with little or no compensation—or worse, send security forces with bulldozers to seize it by force.
As he spoke, Tangsang’s hands trembled. He really believes one day armed police will arrive here, weapons drawn, uprooting his home and taking his land. That fear—visceral and unrelenting—is what makes the idea of chopping off his thumbs feel, to him, a kind of desperate liberation from the fate he dreads.
Tangsang’s fear is not an abstract anxiety—it is rooted in history, in violence lived and remembered. For those who dare to exercise their rights as Indigenous communities, the state does not consistently act as protector in the social contract—it can and has acted as persecutor. Last June, when villagers from Lingkhim and Tapethok stood together and demanded a halt to the hydro project—arguing that construction was rolling forward without proper due diligence—they were met not with dialogue, but with brutality.
Shrawan Limbu, who led the protest, told me that dozens of armed police stormed the site in vehicles hired by the hydro company. What followed was not negotiation but a clash—hours of violent confrontation that felt less like law enforcement for citizen protection than a force serving corporate power (see picture below). With no media present, there was no public reckoning. Since then, Shrawan and several others have gone into hiding, branded by the government with warrants accusing them of inciting ‘violence and instability’.
With tears in his eyes, Shrawan asked, ‘What crime did I commit in protecting our land? Am I not a citizen of this country?’ It is the same frustration and fear that churns in Tangsang’s voice and in the stories of the villagers I met during my research: made powerless in the very place they belong.
The story repeated itself at Pathibhara, known in the Limbu language as Mukkumlung: ancestral site of divine strength. There too, those who protested against the cable car construction were met with harsh punishment and prosecution.
Recourse, a rights‑based organisation, in alliance with the ‘no‑cable‑car’ protest organisers and civil society advocates, recently lodged a formal complaint against the International Finance Corporation—the World Bank’s private‑sector lending arm—for its engagement with the IME Bank, the principal financier of the cable car project. They claim that the IME Bank initiated construction without adhering to basic due diligence protocols, exacerbating concerns about procedural legitimacy. The civil society intervention constitutes a rare fissure in a broader terrain otherwise defined to me, as a researcher, by silence, suppression, and what’s described as ‘systematic erasure of dissent’.
Whether advancing a cable car or a hydroelectric dam, legal limits may exist on paper, but powerful actors frequently sidestep or manipulate them to push projects forward and address regulations later. More often, I’m told, rules are rewritten or ignored to serve vested interests. Despite Nepal’s ratification of the ILO Convention 169—which requires consultation and, where appropriate, Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) for activities affecting Indigenous lands and resources—meaningful consultation with Indigenous communities is routinely absent in natural resource development. In many ways, Nepal’s Indigenous Peoples are left without genuine consent over projects that affect their territories.
What if national conservation is overlaid? Take the case of the Upper Tamor hydro project. Its main powerhouse lies within the Kanchenjunga Conservation Area (KCA), a region governed by laws and regulations, enforced by the locally elected management council. According to the KCA’s rules and regulations, any activity within its boundaries must first be approved by the KCA Management Area Council (KCAMC). During my research, officials from the Council said that the hydro development company had not approached them for the required permissions and that they are exploring legal avenues to challenge the project altogether, underscoring the deeper tensions between development and legal, ethical obligations tied to the state conservation efforts, as well as the land and its people.
The Government of Nepal and its investors are lost in the fog of an uncertain future, ignoring where the relentless exploitation of rivers will ultimately lead. Their current path is clear—a single, narrow focus on profit through a hydro-led green economy, blinding them to the possibility of a more sustainable and diverse way of life, one that nurtures both humans and the natural world. This vision of balance and reverence for the Earth is kept alive among the indigenous communities who fight to protect their rivers, cultures, lands, and ecologies—not just for themselves, but to honour the spirits of their ancestors and ensure these treasures endure for future generations.
The activists I met, from their twenties to their seventies, spoke of their struggle not as a fleeting protest but as a long, patient march—a journey that transcends time. And if they are unable to see it through themselves, like their forebears, they will pass it down with steadfast persistence to those who follow. For them, it is not a matter of merely resisting change—it is about remaining indigenous, refusing to ‘unbecome’ in the face of hydro-led development that seeks to make invisible their way of life or silence their voices. We can take from these communities the ability to carry paradox as a creative tension to find solutions, rather than an either/or approach.
