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Authorities opened all gates of the 690 MW Salal Hydroelectric Power Station on the Chenab River in Jammu & Kashmir's Reasi district on 21 July 2026, after heavy rainfall sharply raised inflow into the reservoir, and urged people near the riverbanks to remain vigilant.
Salal, commissioned in 1987 (construction began 1970, first conceived in 1920), was the first hydropower project built by India in Kashmir under the Indus Waters Treaty regime, and is owned by NHPC.
Jammu & Kashmir receives 12.5% of Salal's power output; the rest feeds the Northern Grid, serving Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.
The dam's 100-metre-high, 1,200-metre-long embankment structure creates a reservoir of about 1,200 million cubic metres.
Assigns the Chenab, a western river, mainly to Pakistan; India may build only run-of-the-river hydel projects like Salal on it
Since the Chenab flows onward from India into Pakistan, releases from upstream dams like Salal raise flows further downstream as well
GS Paper I/III > Rivers and Dams, Indus Waters Treaty, Disaster Management
General Awareness > Geography and Infrastructure
A hydel project that uses a river's natural flow with little to no large-scale water storage, as mandated for India's projects on western rivers under the IWT
The Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, allocated mainly to Pakistan under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, with limited non-consumptive rights for India