The dam is located at a gorge near the (now submerged) upstream Bhakra village in Bilaspur district of Himachal Pradesh and is of height 226 m.[1] The length of the dam (measured from the road above it) is 518.25 m and the width is 9.1 m. Its reservoir known as "Gobind Sagar" stores up to 9.34 billion cubic metres of water.

Bhakra dam is 15 km from Nangal town, Punjab and 106 km from Bilaspur The Bhakra-Nangal multipurpose dams were among the earliest river valley development schemes undertaken by India after independence, though the project had been conceived long before India became a free nation.

Construction of the dam started in 1948; Jawaharlal Nehru poured the first bucket of concrete into the dry riverbed of the Sutlej on 17 November 1955, as a symbolic initiation of the work.

Initially, the construction of the dam was started by Sir Louis Dane, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab.

But the project got delayed and was restarted soon after independence under the chief architect Rai Bahadur Kunwar Sen Gupta.

Historian Ramachandra Guha writes[5]:As he [Nehru] flicked on the switch of the power house, Dakotas of the Indian air force dipper their wings overhead.

As one eyewitness wrote, 'For 150 miles the boisterous celebration spread like a chain reaction along the great canal and the branches and distributaries to the edge of the Rajasthan Desert, long before the water got there'In October 1963, at the ceremony to mark the dedication of the Bhakra–Nangal project to the nation, Prime Minister Nehru said, "This dam has been built with the unrelenting toil of man for the benefit of mankind and therefore is worthy of worship.

On 22 October 2013, the Government of India approved the release of a commemorative stamp to mark the 50th anniversary of the Bhakra Dam.

The large map http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/india/nh-43-03.jpg shows the location of the original Bhakra village that was submerged in the lake formed behind the dam.

The Bhakra Canal fed by this dam provides irrigation to 10 million acres of (40,000 km2) fields in Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan.

[9][10] Generators for the right side were originally supplied by Soviet Union and later upgraded to the present capacity by Russia.

[12] The power generated at Bhakra Dam is distributed among partner states of Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Chandigarh and Delhi.

Its members are appointed by the government of India and by the states of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, and Union territories of Delhi, and Chandigarh.

Since then the Bhakra Beas Management Board is engaged in the regulation of the supply of water and power from Bhakra Nangal Project and Beas Projects to the states of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, and Chandigarh government.