Kopili River
river in India

Kopili River is an interstate river in Northeast India that flows through the states of Meghalaya and Assam and is the largest south bank tributary of the Brahmaputra in Assam.
Course
The Kopili originates in the Meghalaya plateau and flows through Central Assam and the hill districts of Assam before its confluence with the Brahmaputra. In Assam it drains the districts of Karbi Anglong, Dima Hasao, Kamrup and Nagaon. The river flows for a total length of 341 km (212 mi) and has a catchment area of 20,068 km2 (7,748 mi2). It is noted for several spectacular waterfalls along its course which has several deep gorges and rapids in the 120 km (75 mi) of its flow before debouching into the plains at Nagaon district. An average of approximately 3,854 mm of precipitation falls annually over the entire Kopili River catchment area.
Waterworks
Completed in 1975, the Kopili Flow Irrigation Scheme in Kamrup district irrigates 1,300 ha (3,200 acres) of land across 14 revenue villages and facilitates paddy cultivation. The Kopili Hydro Electric Project, located across the districts of Dima Hasao in Assam and Jaintia Hills in Meghalaya and run by the North Eastern Electric Power Corporation, consists of the Khandong and Umrongso dams and their reservoirs and three power houses that have a total installed capacity of 275 MW.
Environmental issues
The Kopili has as many as 54 species of fish in it. Unscientific opencast coal mining in the Kopili's upper reaches in Meghalaya has led to acidification of the river which has in turn left part of the river's course biologically dead, making the water unfit for human consumption and has led to frequent outages at the Kopili Hydro Electric Project's power stations. The 275 MW Kopili Dam Power House of NEEPCO (North Eastern Electric Power Corporation Limited) in Assam suffered major disaster on 7 Oct 2019.
“Kopili River” enters the record as river in India. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kopili, River and river can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11929642. VIAF identifies the subject as 315167193. Authority coordinates are 26.162, 92.276. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kopili River” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.