Uneven and Dammed Development in Burma’s Paunglaung Valley

Uneven and Dammed Development in Burma’s Paunglaung Valley

• By discoversociety
• January 03, 2015

The Upper Paunglaung hydropower dam is scheduled to begin generating electricity for Burma’s capital, Nay Pyi Taw, in January after the dam’s floodgates were closed in July last year. Since early 2013 over 8,000 people have been displaced from their homes, farms, schools, and religious sites in south western Shan State’s Paunglaung Valley, located just 50 km east of the capital, where a 60 sq km reservoir now dominates the landscape. Displaced farming communities have constructed new villages on the steep, muddy hillsides surrounding the rising reservoir where a lack of clean water and a poorly planned resettlement process has been exacerbated by inadequate compensation and a complete lack of replacement farmland resulting in many families’ now struggling to subsist.

As part of a joint venture with the Union of Myanmar’s Ministry of Electric Power (MOEP), the design and construction of the dam has been overseen by the Swiss engineering consultant Colenco AG, acquired in 2007 by the AF Group, the Sweden based international energy giant. British and German firms Malcolm Dunstan & Associates and FOSCE Consulting Engineers – both self-proclaimed experts in Roller-Compact Concrete dam building – have acted as design and construction consultants. Machinery and capital has been provided by China’s Yunnan Machinery Export Company. This capital intensive hydropower project has dispossessed more than 1,500 low income rural households, from 24 villages, of their livelihoods in this highly fertile valley.

http://www.discoversociety.org/2015/01/03/uneven-and-dammed-development-in-burmas-paunglaung-valley/