Mangla Dam
What is the Mangla Dam, and where is it located?
When was the Mangla Dam completed, and what was its cost?
What was the purpose of the Indus Waters Treaty?
What was the human impact of the Mangla Dam’s construction?
Mangla Dam, embankment dam on the Jhelum River near Jhelum, Pakistan. Mangla Dam, completed in 1967, is one of Pakistan’s largest hydroelectric projects. Along with the Tarbela Dam and the Chashma Dam, it is one of the main structures constructed as part of the Indus Basin Project, a result of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) signed on September 19, 1960, between India and Pakistan.
History
The IWT assigned the waters of the three eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej) of the Indus River system to India and those of the three western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab) to Pakistan. Mangla Dam was the first dam built as part of the Indus Basin Project, which resulted from the IWT. Construction of the dam began in March 1963 and cost about $434 million. The Pakistani government received financial support for the project through the World Bank–managed Indus Basin Development Fund, which received funds from countries such as Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and India.
The primary dam was constructed on sandstone bedrock. Owing to weaknesses in the region’s clay beds, builders added a toe weight, or a heavy structure at the base of the dam, to provide compensatory support. When construction for the dam was completed in June 1967, it was the largest embankment dam project in the world.
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Situated in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and built over a river that traverses both India and Pakistan, the Mangla Dam has at times been subject to tensions surrounding the impact of India’s upstream hydroelectric projects on the Jhelum River system. In 2018 India, after strained deliberations with Pakistan moderated by the World Bank, constructed the Kishanganga Dam on a tributary of the Jhelum River upstream of the Mangla Dam. Assessing the precise impact of such actions on Mangla’s inflows is complicated by the natural seasonal variability of the dam’s reserves. In 2025 India suspended its participation in the IWT by holding it in abeyance as part of its response to a terror attack in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir, in April.
Dimensions and power generation
When it was completed, the dam structure rose 138 meters (453 feet) above ground level, was about 3,140 meters (10,300 feet) wide at its crest, and had a volume of 65.4 million cubic meters (85.5 million cubic yards). Along with its three small subsidiary dams, it had an initial installed power capacity of at least 600 megawatts, which was increased to 1,000 megawatts in the mid-1990s. Further modernization efforts such as the Mangla Refurbishment Project, an ongoing project scheduled for completion by 2027, aim to raise the dam’s power generation capacity to 1,310 megawatts.
Although its impounded reservoir originally had a gross capacity of about 7.3 billion cubic meters (about 9.5 billion cubic yards), the amount of water impounded gradually diminished because of silting by about 20 percent by the early 2000s. A five-year project, completed in 2009, raised the height of the dam by 9 meters (30 feet), raising its storage capacity to some 9.13 billion cubic meters (12.2 billion cubic yards).
Human impact
More than 280 villages were submerged and the towns of Mirpur and Dadyal flooded when the Mangla Dam was completed in 1967. This resulted in the displacement of more than 100,000 people. A significant proportion of the displaced population is believed to have immigrated to the United Kingdom, a guarantor of the project (immigrant status was included in the compensation package for many locals). As per 2011 census figures, about 70 percent of the Pakistani community in the U.K. originates from the Dadyal-Mirpur area, with 747,000 people from the region living in the U.K.
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