There is a strange quality to Kaptai Lake on a calm morning. Hills rise out of the water like islands, boats cross a surface that looks as if it has always been there, and fishermen cast nets where, sixty years ago, there were fields, paths and houses. It is easy, from a boat, to see only the beauty. It is harder, and more necessary, to remember that the lake is not natural. It was made by a dam, and the making of it displaced about 100,000 people, flooded farmland and forests, submerged parts of Rangamati town, including the palace of the Chakma Raja, and reshaped the lives of the indigenous Jumma peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The dam also brought electricity to a region that needed it, and the lake today supports fishing, transport and tourism. Both of those statements are true, and any honest account of Kaptai must hold them together, without letting one erase the other.
A River, a Plan, and a New State's Ambition
The Karnaphuli River flows from the hills of the Chittagong Hill Tracts towards Chittagong city and the Bay of Bengal. The idea of damming it for hydroelectric power was considered long before the dam was built: a brief reconnaissance occurred in 1906, a second study was carried out in 1923, and later proposals considered different sites upstream and downstream of the present dam site at Kaptai. Under the guidance of the chief engineer for irrigation, Khwaja Azimuddin, the construction site was chosen in 1951, and Utah International Inc. was selected as the construction contractor.
Construction began in the late 1950s, with American financial and technical support, and was completed in 1962, in what was then East Pakistan. The dam is an earth-fill embankment dam on the Karnaphuli at Kaptai, about 65 kilometres upstream from Chittagong, in Rangamati District. It is 670.6 metres long and 54.7 metres high, with a spillway equipped with 16 gates. The Karnaphuli Hydropower Station, commonly called the Kaptai Hydroelectric Power Station, is the only hydroelectric power station in Bangladesh. Its installed capacity is generally cited as 230 megawatts, with generators commissioned between 1962 and 1988, although recent reports from the plant have described a maximum generation capacity of 240 megawatts, reflecting different ways of counting the five units now in operation. The initial planned capacity was 120,000 kilowatts, with Units 1 and 2 each at 40 megawatts, and Unit 3, begun in 1969, at 50 megawatts.
For the government of Pakistan, the case for the dam was straightforward, and it is important to state it fairly. East Pakistan needed electricity for its towns, industries and growing population, and hydroelectric power from the Karnaphuli offered a domestic source that did not depend on imported fuel. The dam was presented as development: power for the region, and a reservoir that could, in time, support other uses. That argument was not invented after the fact; it was the reason the project was funded and built. The question that has divided opinion ever since is not whether electricity has value, but at what cost, to whom, and with what compensation, the power was obtained.
The Flooding of a Valley
When the reservoir filled, the scale of what was lost became clear. Accounts differ on the exact area flooded, and that difference itself deserves attention. Some accounts give about 655 square kilometres flooded, including 22,000 hectares of cultivable land. Others give about 1,036 square kilometres of land flooded, including around 54,000 acres of the best arable land. The figures are not easily reconciled, because they may reflect different measurements, different definitions of the reservoir area at full supply level, or different stages of the project. What is consistent across accounts is the order of magnitude: hundreds of square kilometres, tens of thousands of acres of farmland, and a substantial share of the Hill Tracts' cultivable land. One widely cited figure is that the flooding covered roughly 40 percent of all arable land in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and another account notes that about 40 percent of the area's total farmland, around 54,000 acres, went underwater, along with about 29 square miles of reserved forest and 234 square miles of unclassified forest.
The human figure is more consistent: over 100,000 people displaced, most of them Chakmas, the largest ethnic group in the hills, who are Buddhist, with their own language and customs. One account puts the displaced at 100,000 tribal people, 70 percent of them Chakmas, and another notes that Chakmas made up 90 percent of the 10,000 people whose 54,000 acres of farmland were flooded in 1962, a reminder that aggregate figures can hide how concentrated the loss was in particular communities. Parts of Rangamati town, the capital of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, including the palace of the Chakma Raja, were submerged. Buddhist temples and other physical vestiges of Chakma culture receded beneath the water. For the displaced, the experience is remembered in Chakma collective memory as Bor Porong, the Great Departure, and the reservoir is often called the Lake of Tears.
Displacement took two broad paths. About 60 percent were resettled, according to one account, while about 40 percent fled to India. Another account reports that around 40,000 moved to the neighbouring Indian states of Mizoram, Tripura and Arunachal, then called the Northeast Frontier Agency, and another 15,000 to 20,000 to Myanmar. A later account notes that in 1964, India accepted a substantial number of displaced Chakmas, resettling about 35,000 of them in Arunachal Pradesh over subsequent years. The precise numbers vary by source and by year, but the pattern is clear: a large share of the displaced did not remain in the Hill Tracts, and many of those who did faced hardship in remote, hilly areas in the northern Hill Tracts, where starting a new life proved difficult.
Compensation is the most contested part of the story. One account states plainly that the displaced stayed in hopes of receiving the compensation promised by the government, a promise that was never delivered upon. Another describes the rehabilitation programme as a cruel farce, and the compensation likewise. A third notes inept relocation and insufficient compensation. These are strong judgements, and they come from writers sympathetic to the displaced, so they should be read as documented positions rather than neutral measurements. At the same time, no account consulted for this story presents evidence of a rehabilitation programme that restored the displaced to equivalent farmland and livelihoods. The absence of such evidence, across sources with different perspectives, is itself significant. The dam destroyed the agro-based economy of the Hill Tracts for many families, and the loss was not only economic: sisters were separated from brothers, mothers from children, as families split between those who stayed and those who left for India, a separation recorded in oral testimonies collected since 2012 by Susama Chakma for her book on the Bor Porong.
The Lake Today: Power, Fish, Boats and Visitors
Sixty years on, Kaptai Lake is a working landscape, not a ruin. The Karnaphuli Hydropower Station still generates electricity, although its output varies sharply with the water level. In wet periods, the plant has been reported generating up to 222 megawatts from its five units, with all 16 spillway gates opened to relieve pressure. In dry periods, generation can fall dramatically: one report described only two of five units in operation, generating 58 megawatts, far below maximum capacity, with the lake level well below its rule-curve level, and another described only 40 megawatts from a single unit. The lake's maximum water-holding capacity is 109 feet above mean sea level, and the seasonal swing between monsoon high water and dry-season low water shapes everything from power generation to navigation. When the water falls, canals and tributaries dependent on the lake can dry up, small boat traffic stops, and the time and cost of transporting agricultural products and daily necessities increase.
Fishing is now one of the lake's most important livelihoods. Nearly 21,000 fishermen from Rangamati and Khagrachhari districts earn their livelihood through fishing in the lake, according to a Daily Star report. Every year, the authorities impose a ban on fishing from 1 May to 31 July for safe breeding, to allow mother fish to lay eggs and increase fish production, followed by a regulated reopening. Over time, the lake has evolved into not only a major source of hydropower but also one of Bangladesh's important fisheries and livelihood resources, and today it plays a significant role in the economy of Rangamati, supporting fishing, transportation and tourism.
Tourism is the most visible new use. Kaptai Lake is described as Bangladesh's largest artificial lake, and visitors explore it by boat, kayak or speedboat, visiting the Rangamati Hanging Bridge, Shuvolong Waterfalls and island restaurants such as Peda Ting Ting. Boats are available for hire at Reserve Bazar, Tabalchhari and tourist wharves. The hanging bridge, 335 feet long, is considered a symbol of Rangamati tourism, connecting two hills in the middle of the lake. For boat owners, shopkeepers selling traditional clothes and handicrafts, and hotel owners, the tourist season can cover a family's expenses for the whole year, which also means that disruptions, such as a bridge closure due to high water, or a heatwave combined with low water and load shedding, can bring local life almost to a standstill, as recent local reporting has described.
Two Ways of Seeing the Same Water
How, then, should a visitor see Kaptai Lake? The dam's supporters, then and now, point to a real achievement: Bangladesh's only hydroelectric station, built with the technology of its time, providing power without fuel imports, and a lake that now supports tens of thousands of fishing livelihoods and a tourism economy that did not exist before. That is not a trivial outcome, and it would be wrong to write the dam off as producing nothing of value.
The displaced and their descendants point to a different ledger: farmland that cannot be recovered, a palace and temples under water, a community scattered across borders, compensation that was inadequate or never arrived, and a sense that decisions about their valley were made without their meaningful consent. That, too, is not a trivial outcome, and it would be wrong to treat the lake's beauty as an answer to it. The term Bor Porong, the Great Departure, captures something that a list of megawatts cannot: for many families, the flooding was not a project phase, but a rupture that separated generations.
A fair visit to Kaptai Lake holds both ledgers in view. Enjoy the boat ride, the hills rising from the water, and the fisherman's catch, but remember that the water covers fields where people once farmed, and that the hills that look like islands were once connected by paths that are now submerged. The lake is beautiful, and it is also a reminder. Both facts belong in the same story, because both are part of what Kaptai is.