Ladakh starts pushing 320 million litres a day toward shrinking Tso Kar

Ladakh Lieutenant Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena on Sunday formally launched a scheme to send glacier melt from the Rupsho Kharnak stream into Tso Kar, the salt lake on the Rupshu plateau that has lost close to 70 percent of its water in ten years. Officials say the target flow is 132 cusecs, or about 320 million litres a day, drawn from a stream that now runs unused into the Indus system about 11 kilometres from the lake. The intake sits near 18,000 feet. The lake itself lies near 15,000 feet.

The surface numbers are the reason the project exists. Administrators put the old spread at about 11,000 acres and the present spread at about 3,200. Tso Kar is the saline northern basin of a Ramsar wetland complex designated in November 2020 as India’s 42nd site. Startsapuk Tso, a freshwater basin of about 438 hectares, sits to the south. As the salt lake contracted, the count of migratory birds that used the complex fell with it. Changpa herders still graze yaks, sheep and goats on the surrounding flats.

The engineering is deliberately thin. There are no concrete canals. Melt will move by gravity through earthworks into three natural depressions: 270 acres, then 24, then 10. Check dams with RCC pipes are meant to drop sediment before the water reaches the lake. Together the three basins are expected to hold about 1.23 billion litres and to form new freshwater wetland. Work on the first depression began before winter. From 9 September, about 20 cusecs have already been turned into that basin, and officials say it is filling.

The precedent is local. Earlier this year the administration moved 90 million litres from the Stok Glacier into canals that serve Igoo-Phey and Chuchot near Leh. That scheme was about irrigation. Tso Kar is about a dying Ramsar lake and the birds and pasture that go with it. Officials have said that if the full 132 cusecs can be held and delivered, the lake could recover its old extent within a year. That claim is a forecast, not a measurement. A year of evaporation, seepage and winter freeze will test it.

There is a second risk the launch remarks did not dwell on. Diverting a stream that now reaches the Indus changes a small tributary budget on a river that is already a political object. The volumes are modest next to the main stem. They are not modest next to a closed saline basin that has no outlet. Adding a large freshwater pulse to a shrinking salt lake will change chemistry as well as area. The Ramsar citation depends on both.

What can be checked this month is simpler. Is the first 270-acre depression still taking 20 cusecs? Do the second and third basins exist as surveyed earthworks before the passes close? Does any bird count from the wildlife department get published against last autumn’s figures? Those three facts will show whether Sunday was a ceremony or the start of a recharge.

Tso Kar’s white crust gave the lake its name. If the scheme works, that crust will sit farther from the present shoreline. If it fails, the 3,200 acres will keep shrinking through another winter, and the 320 million litre figure will join the list of Himalayan water promises that never reached the bed.