River(Impounds): Damodar River
Location: Dhanbad district, Jharkhand
Opening: 1959
Height: 45.00 metres
Length: 6,777 metres
Total Capacity: 1497.54 million m3
HISTORY:
Panchet Dam (পাঞ্চেত বাঁধ, पन्चेत बांध) was the last of the four multi-purpose dams included in the first phase of the Damodar Valley Corporation. It was constructed across the Damodar River at Panchet in Dhanbad district in the Indian state of Jharkhand, and opened in 1959.Telkupi, a village under Raghunathpur police station, was submerged with the construction of Panchet Dam. Telkupi was capital of Tilakampa Kingdom, of which Panchakot Raj was probably a part. The ruins of the garh (fort) of the Singh Deo dynasty of Panchakot located at the southern foothills and a group of temples are still standing as mute spectators of the rise and fall of the dynasty. J.D.Beglar who visited Telkupi in 1902 described it as ‘containing, perhaps, the finest and largest number of temples within a small space that is to be found in the Chutia Nagpur Circle in Bengal’. He listed over twenty temples and referred to several others and to ‘numerous mounds, both of brick and stone’. Telkupi dates back to the 1st century AD. The temples submerged at Telkupi were Jain temples.In 1959, Jawaharlal Nehru, then Prime Minister of India, was invited to inaugurate the newly constructed Panchet Dam. The officials selected two project workers, fifteen-year-old Santhal girls Budhni Mejhan and Robon Majhi, to welcome the Prime Minister. Budhni Mejhan formally garlanded Nehru. When Budhni returned home to her village of Karbona, the village elders told her that since she had garlanded Nehru, she had effectively “married” him; and since Nehru wasn’t a Santhal, she had married outside the community. As result of this “crime”, she was chased out of the village and shunned by her family and neighbours. Later she found refuge in the house of Panchet resident Sudhir Dutta and had a daughter by him; the daughter is also rejected by the Santhal community. In 1962, the DVC fired Budhni from her staff position. In 1985, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi reinstated her at the DVC, but she and her daughter remain outcasts from their village.The Damodar was once an endemic flood-prone river. The Maithon and Panchet dams, constructed in 1957 and 1959 respectively, have significantly reduced daily and annual discharge and also largely eliminated the extremes of flow so that ten-year recurrence interval floods have been reduced to half. Sediment trapping in reservoirs and the lack of flushing due to reduced peak discharge have inevitably transformed the lower Damodar basin into an ecologically imbalanced area.and about the dangers of large-scale intervention in nature.