Rogun, Tajikistan – From Dushanbe, the journey to Rogun begins like many journeys in Tajikistan. You approach the edges of the capital with its wide, quiet streets and tidy parks, then the urbanisation begins to fade. The road turns into a long ribbon that climbs and bends between rocky hills and small villages, before the Vakhsh River appears below like an angry blue thread slicing through the valley.There are no “touristy scenes” on either side of the road – no luxury hotels, no large billboards, and no restaurants competing to welcome passersby. Only silent mountains, heavy trucks and workers heading towards a grand project almost every Tajik has heard about: the Rogun Dam.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listIn a country that knows the true meaning of winter cold, power outages and harsh geography, the idea of this dam has become much more than a mere wall holding back water. It has become a promise of so much more.Indeed, the $5bn Rogun project, originally launched in the mid-1970s to tackle Tajikistan’s chronic energy shortages, has been described by President Emomali Rahmon as a matter of “life or death”.The country, which has long suffered from winter power shortages, sees the dam as an opportunity to reduce the seasonal deficit, improve power supplies, and perhaps eventually export the surplus to neighbouring countries. Rogun dam is not built on …
