Digitising Safety: How India Is Building A National Digital Nerve Centre For Its 6,600 Dams

For decades, India’s dams—critical to agriculture, drinking water, hydropower and flood control—were managed through fragmented records, random inspections and largely paper-based oversight. 

That is now changing. Under the Dam Safety Act, 2021, the National Dam Safety Authority (NDSA) has begun a sweeping digitisation drive that, for the first time, brings all of India’s 6,600 dams onto a single digital platform.

“We had the information earlier, but it was scattered. Now everything would be digital form,” said Anil Jain, Chairman, NDSA.

The NDSA has introduced Dam Health and Rehabilitation Monitoring Application (DHARMA) portal where all dams in the country have now been registered which was not there before the Act. 

“Dam owners are required to upload engineering details, project benefits, location data, instrumentation readings, inspection reports and even inundation maps. Earlier, only 1200 inspections were being held per year and after this Act, over 13000 dam inspection are being recorded every year,” Jain said. 

Digitisation is not merely about record-keeping. It is reshaping how dam safety risks are identified, prioritised and managed.

Mapping Risk In Real-Time

For the first time, India is conducting risk assessment studies for dams, a legally mandated exercise under the Dam Safety Act 2021. The process begins with a qualitative risk assessment, which assigns relative risk scores by combining a dam’s structural health with the potential damage it could cause downstream.

“This helps states prioritise which dams need attention first, based on available resources,” Jain explained.

He said that every dam is now inspected twice a year, using visual checks and instrumentation data. Based on these inspections, dams are categorised into three groups.

“As of the post-monsoon inspections of 2025, 225 dams have been identified as Category II, requiring major rehabilitation. One dam is in Category I, needing immediate attention, while the remaining dams fall under Category III, requiring minor repairs,” he added.

Experts have already been deployed to the lone Category I dam, where repair work is underway.

Understanding Dam Damage, Failures

Reliable data on dam failures has long been a blind spot in India. Jain highlighted that before the Dam Safety Act, reporting dam failures was not mandatory, leading to under-reporting and inconsistent documentation.

With digitised reporting now in place, NDSA data shows that since 1979, India has recorded around 45–47 dam failure incidents. These include structural failures, malfunctioning gates, damaged bolts or welds, and overtopping during extreme floods. Not all failures were flood-induced; several resulted from mechanical or structural weaknesses during water discharge operations.

“Now, all such incidents are reported to us,” Jain said, marking a significant shift in transparency.

Preparing For Emergencies

The organisation has come up with Emergency Action Plans (EAPs) for every dam. These plans are based on dam-break studies, which model flood scenarios, identify downstream inundation areas and estimate populations at risk.

NDSA, in collaboration with the Central Design Authority (CDA), Pune, is conducting simplified dam-break analyses for all dams. By May 2026, inundation maps for all 6,600 dams are expected to be ready—an unprecedented national dataset.

“You can’t prepare an emergency plan unless you know who will be affected and where,” Jain said.

Concerns over dam safety are not limited to India’s own infrastructure. China’s proposed mega dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo river, upstream of the Siang in Arunachal Pradesh, has triggered sharp alarm in downstream regions. Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister has described the project as an “existential threat,” warning that it could act like a “water bomb” if large volumes are suddenly released, potentially flooding the entire Siang belt and devastating tribal communities, agriculture and local livelihoods. 

Beyond environmental risks, the project has heightened geopolitical anxieties, with India and Bangladesh wary of upstream water control being used as a strategic tool, underscoring why robust dam safety monitoring, data transparency and basin-level coordination have become increasingly critical in a climate- and conflict-prone region.

Toward Central Command

Digitisation also underpins NDSA’s long-term vision. Over the next five years, the authority aims to ensure that all dams are fully instrumented, with real-time health data flowing to a central command system. This would allow dam owners to make informed decisions on both structural safety and reservoir operations.

The goal, Jain says, is coordinated reservoir management at the river basin level, cutting across state boundaries—a necessity in an era of climate-driven extreme floods.

“Dams are critical infrastructure,” he says. “They must be connected to each other.”

With digital databases, India’s dam safety regime is finally moving from reactive repairs to data-driven prevention—turning thousands of concrete structures into a connected national safety network.