Chandil Dam

The dam is part of the Subarnarekha Multipurpose Project, sponsored jointly by Bihar (now Jharkhand), Odisha and West Bengal under an agreement signed in 1978. Its main works are Chandil Dam and the Galudih Barrage on the Subarnarekha, and Icha Dam and the Kharkai Barrage on the Kharkai, with a network of canals. Work on the project began in 1982-83. The dam itself is about 720 m long and 56.5 m high.

The reservoir came at a heavy cost. Figures from the project office, reported in 2019, put the displacement at 116 villages and 19,115 families, and many were still waiting for rehabilitation four decades on. The project has faced protests since its early years.

Some of the displaced formed a fishing cooperative in 2005; the right to fish in the water that now covered their land had been one of their demands. A pilot cage-farming project followed in 2007, and from 2011 the state subsidised floating cages for the cooperative. Jharkhand Tourism says it now supports about 2,000 families, one of the first examples of cage culture in a reservoir run by displaced people.

Long before the dam, this country belonged to the Patkum estate, whose capital was Ichagarh, in the old Manbhum district of Bengal. Excavations during the dam's construction in 1990-92 turned up Stone Age material and stone sculptures and inscriptions from roughly the 5th to the 12th centuries, now kept in the Patkum Museum.