Siang UMP: 18 Years, No Contractor, No Cost Basis

No Tender, No Consultant, No Cost Basis

The Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh has confirmed what contractors have suspected: the Siang Upper Multipurpose Project has no tender, no named consultant, no cost basis and no land schedule.

Pema Khandu told residents of Siang and Upper Siang districts on 2 November that neither the state nor the Centre has decided to build it, and that only a Pre-Feasibility Report is being commissioned.

Siang UMP has carried National Project status since the Union Cabinet cleared it on 7 February 2008.

Eighteen years on, the deliverable is still a study.

Upstream Pressure and the PFR Mandate

The trigger is upstream.

China began construction at Medog County on the Yarlung Tsangpo on 19 July 2025, roughly 40 km from the Indian border.

Khandu puts the share of the Aane Siang's flow originating in Chinese territory at about 65 per cent.

Read the PFR mandate in that light: its primary output is hydrological risk, and power generation is the financing argument bolted onto it.

Planning documents have carried capacity near 11,000 MW.

None of it has been procured, and National Project status means the Union government, not the state balance sheet, is underwriting the study phase.

Consent, Contracting and the Four Open Routes

The consent clause is where this turns into a contracting problem. Khandu has tied any construction decision to public consent.

Neither the RFCTLARR Act 2013 nor the Environment Protection Act 1986 requires community consent for a dam.

He has set an approval threshold above statute, in a valley that ran a 36-hour bandh, saw internet suspended across Upper Siang and produced arrests, with youth bodies calling shutdowns in three districts.

Any future EPC package inherits that.

Contractor exposure runs through site access, local workforce mobilisation and schedule certainty — none of which a force majeure clause prices honestly.

Four routes stay open:

- A hydrology and PFR consultancy mandate, the only near-term award.
- Storage sized for ecological flow rather than peaking revenue.
- Basin flood forecasting with no dam at all.
- A decision to build nothing, absorbing flow risk as a monitoring cost.

The Adi Community Is the Schedule

The Adi community and groups such as the Arunachal Indigenous Tribes Forum are not a permitting formality. They are the schedule.

Firms positioning for Siang UMP should price political risk, not rockfill.