Environmental damage

“Hey Rupam, open the door. Take this fish,” a woman yelled from outside. I was sitting in the kitchen at my friend Rupam’s house in rural northeast India. It was the heart of monsoon season, and rain had been falling since morning. The woman must have been shouting because the noise of the rain on the tin roof muted everything else. The aunty who lived next door stood outside with a large bowl of Boriala fish. Her husband had gone fishing on the Subansiri River, which flows next to the village, and he had fished all evening. “My husband cannot stay indoors in this weather,” she said in Assamese, the local language. “You can catch a lot of fish during this time.” The monsoon season has long brought a bounty of fish from May to September for people living downstream. However, this is likely to change once the Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project, one of the largest hydropower dams in India, is completed upstream. Expected to be fully op...