Parag Jyoti Saikia

This project investigates how a massive’but incomplete’hydroelectric dam is reshaping everyday life, local ecologies and geopolitics in India’s North-East. Started in 2005, the Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project (SLHEP) was supposed to be the flag-bearer of India’s ambitious effort to transform this borderland region into the ‘Future Powerhouse of India”the first of 168 dams to this end. In 2011, SLHEP’s construction stopped halfway through the project, halting the push to develop the mega-energy infrastructures of the ‘Future Powerhouse.’ My project asks what infrastructures do when they remain incomplete. The dam’s incompleteness has spawned its own ‘ecology’ of communities, infrastructure, river, geopolitics, and more’a web of relations that is always-changing, tenuous, and generative. I explore these changing ‘ecologies’ to understand how incomplete infrastructure shapes life, environment and geopolitics. My project contributes to theorization of incomplete infrastructures, and state-making in frontiers. I will ethnographically examine: 1. How does this incomplete infrastructure shape local ecologies and their attendant lifeways, and 2. How is SLHEP altering locals’ experience of the Indian state in this contested frontier?