This is an abstract from MESAS associate, Loren Michael's Ph.D. work on the history of hydropower and irrigation development in India:
India's first major hydroelectric power installation started generating electricity in 1902. From Sivasamudram, an island located in the upper course of the Cauvery River in South India, the power station initially transmitted three megawatts of electricity 90 miles to the Kolar Gold Field mines operated by a consortium of British companies.
Gold had been mined on a small scale for centuries in various locations in South India. In the 1880s,
a British company struck gold in the Kolar District of Mysore State, due east of Bengalore. However,
the auriferous veins ran to great depths, and required heavy machinery and steam engines for
deep-shaft operations. Since low calorific steam coal was not available in South India, it had to be
brought at considerable expense from distant fields in Hyderabad State and Bengal. Despite the
chronic fuel problems, the mining companies were prospering and were investing their profits in new
equipment to improve the productivity of the mines.
Electricity was revolutionizing gold mining elsewhere, and the mine engineers at Kolar, thinking that
hydroelectricity might meet the gold mines' requirements for a source of inexpensive electricity, kept
abreast of recent developments in the USA, at Niagara Falls. The Niagara Power Company had
devised a dual strategy for marketing electricity, first through attraction of power consuming
electo-chemical and electro-metallurgical to the area, and then through extension of electrical service to
Buffalo, New York.
The development of hydropower at Niagara Falls had determined an electrical frequency suitable for industrial processing, urban lighting and traction and had to develop power lines capable of overcoming recurring problems with lightning, switching and cable insulation. The machinery and technology developed by first Westinghouse and then by General Electric (GE) at Niagara Falls had by 1898 developed into a reproducible power complex that would set the standards for other hydroelectric power installations. GE's work at Niagara Falls was widely known, they had installed hydroelectric power equipment for gold mines in America and South America, and the company was intent upon expanding its sales throughout the world.
GE was commissioned by Mysore State to build the first hydroelectric installation in India at Cauvery
Falls, one of a series of waterfalls located where the Cauvery River descends from the Mysore Plateau
into the former Madras Presidency. The power station was named after the island of Sivasamudram,
nearby the Falls. Mysore retained one of General Electric's engineers, Harry Parker Gibbs, as the
Chief Electrical Engineer of the State's new Electrical Department and sent four Indian members of the
departmental staff to GE's headquarters in Schenectady, New York for training. Gibbs was later hired by
the Tata Hydro-Electric Power Company as General Manager, to supply electricity to cotton textile mills
of Bombay City.
The original agreement of 1900 between Mysore State and the Madras Presidency had stipulated that
"all water diverted from the river for the power works shall be returned to the river below the Falls without
being fouled or diminished in quantity." Plans in 1910 were made to build a reservoir across the
Cauvery River just above Mysore City. This was to be one of the world's first multipurpose reservoirs,
for developing more power at Sivasamudram and for irrigation. This brought the Sivasamudram power
development into the context of a long standing dispute over the Cauvery River's water.
By the end of the 19th Century, the Cauvery River system had been fully utilized for irrigation. From 1837 onwards, British military engineers, building diversion dams based upon indigenous hydraulic principles, had extended pre-existing inundation irrigation systems. The Sivasamudram hydropower station had also relied upon diversion dams. The new exploitation of the Cauvery River for both irrigation and for hydroelectric power, put emphasis upon construction of large regulating reservoirs. This led to increased interstate disputes over the projected uses of the river that remain to this day.
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