J&K govt announces revival of 120-yr-old power project

SRINAGAR: As the Jammu and Kashmir government is accelerating work on power projects in the wake of the Government of India putting the Indus Water Treaty in abeyance following the Pahalgam terror attack in April 2025, it has announced to revive the historic Mohra Power Project — a 120-year-old hydroelectric facility that has remained defunct since the 1990s.

CM Omar Abdullah, who also holds charge of the power department, told the J&K Assembly on Wednesday that the Board of Directors of the J&K State Power Development Corporation had initiated the process for the project’s revival. In a meeting held on Feb 9, the board approved the floating of a limited tender enquiry to engage a transaction adviser from firms empanelled with the Department of Economic Affairs for the renovation, modernisation, upgrade, operation and maintenance of the 10.5MW plant.

Located on the banks of the Jhelum River in Boniyar in Uri sector of north Kashmir’s Baramulla district, the Mohra Power Project was commissioned in 1905 and is among the oldest hydroelectric stations in India.

It was built as a run-of-the-river project and initially had a capacity of about 5 MW. The project was damaged by floods in Sept 1992, after which its tailrace system was affected, and power generation declined to around 3 MW before operations ceased, said former engineer Iftikhar A Drabu, who has worked on major hydropower projects in J&K for over three decades, including Kishanganga and Dulhasti.

The announcement regarding the Mohra project came just days after CM Omar told the Assembly on March 27 that the pace of construction of ongoing hydel power projects across J&K was being accelerated “in the backdrop of the Indus Water Treaty being kept in abeyance”. It appears to be part of the plan to maximise generation from the current 3540 MW to around 11000 MW by 2035.

“The Mohra hydroelectric plant was constructed after the major floods of 1903 to support dredging operations in the Jhelum. Its turbines were brought from Czechoslovakia,” Drabu said.

The most striking feature of the project is its wooden water channel, stretching more than 10 km along the mountains. Water was carried from Rampur to Mohra through the wooden flume to drive the turbines, making it a low-impact engineering feat for its time, Drabu said.

“About nine years ago, there was a proposal to develop it as a heritage structure, but it did not move forward,” said Hashmat A Qazi, former chief engineer with the Power Development Department. Though its proposed capacity of about 10.5MW is modest and unlikely to significantly reduce the region’s power deficit, Qazi said the revival carries historical and symbolic importance, and the project has great heritage value.

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