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The fiscal year 2025-26 was a watershed moment in Karnataka’s long and storied hydel power journey; for the first time, the state’s strategically located hydel power stations – four each in the Sharavathi and Kali river valleys, two each in the Varahi and Kaveri valleys, one on the Krishna and one on the Tungabhadra – generated a record-breaking 15,509 million units of power. In an age where clean power is currency, this was a stellar achievement, especially considering that some of those stations are among the country’s oldest.
Karnataka’s hydel power journey began with the commissioning of the Shivanasamudra hydroelectric project on June 30, 1902, 124 years ago this month. Technically, it was the second hydel project in India – the first, with a capacity of 130kW, came up at Sidrapong in Darjeeling in 1898 – but with its original capacity of 4,320 kW (today, it is 42 MW) catapulting it to the status of Asia’s then-largest hydroelectric plant, Shivanasamudra was an altogether different beast.
Deservedly, the visionary triumvirate of the regent queen of Mysore, Maharani Kempananjammanni, her minor son, Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, and Dewan K Seshadri Iyer are lauded for the political backing they provided to the Shivanasamudra hydel project. As per usual, however, the engineers behind the project are largely forgotten. One of those stalwarts was a Canadian Royal Engineer, Capt Alain Chartier Joly de ‘Lobo’ Lotbiniere.
The immediate reason to explore the possibility of generating electricity for Mysore was rooted in economics. To the north-east of Bangalore was historically gold-rich Kolar. In 1880, British mining company John Taylor & Sons obtained a lease to professionally extract gold in the region. But by the 1890s, the Kolar mines, deeper than any other in the world and prone to fill up with water, were beginning to confound the engineers. It was clear that a greater power – electricity, trending since 1882, when TA Edison opened the world’s first commercial power station in New York – would need to be called in.
Around the same time that Edison was setting up his power station, our Capt Lobo was graduating from the Royal Marines College in Kingston, Canada. In 1886, he joined the Royal Engineers and travelled to India. Once here, he was involved in several projects, including the monumental one (completed in 1892) to bring water to Murree (alt 2291m; in today’s Pakistan). Soon after, at the behest of the Mysore government, which, traumatized by the devastating drought of 1876-78, was keen to solve a similar problem of drinking water in Bangalore (alt 965 m), Lobo arrived in our fair city. In 1894, through the pioneering efforts of engineers like Lobo, the Chamarajendra Water Works was commissioned at Hesaraghatta, bringing sweet Arkavathi water to Bangaloreans as part of the city’s first piped water supply.
In 1899, Capt Lobo was appointed Deputy Chief Engineer of Mysore, where he reviewed an 1894 proposal to generate electricity from the Shivanasamudra Falls. Inspired by the Tesla-Westinghouse Niagara Falls Power Plant (1895), Lobo submitted a feasible version of the old proposal, outlining the commercial benefits to the kingdom of supplying power for extracting gold. The proposal was approved, and Lobo sent forthwith on a “study tour” of Britain and America on a daily allowance of one pound sterling.
In England, Lobo constituted an expert committee for the project, and invited tenders from the British electrical company Westinghouse, Swiss companies Brown Boveri and Oerlikon, and Edison’s own General Electric. In America, he toured various hydroelectric projects, including the Niagara one. Finally, GE was awarded the contract to supply the electric generators. Over the next two years, tonnes of heavy machinery arriving at the Mormugao port was transported to Maddur by rail, and thence to Shivanasamudra, over kachha roads, by doughty Mysore bullocks, horses and elephants. Until, at long last, Asia’s largest hydel power station was built.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)
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