(TibetanReview.net, Oct01’25) – India is to build in Arunachal Pradesh what would be its largest dam with a design to absorb any possible weaponized release of water from the world’s largest and potentially most dangerous dam China is building just across the border in occupied Tibet, according to media reports.
However, unlike the project in Tibet, where any local opposition is unthinkable because of the brutality of the occupying power towards any perceived opposition to its rule, the Indian project faces stiff opposition from a section of the local population whose villages may be submerged by it.
Proposed blueprints show India considering the site in Arunachal Pradesh for a massive storage reservoir, equal to four million Olympic-size swimming pools, behind a 280-metre (918-foot) high dam, reported the AFP Sep 30.
China recently broke ground for the building of the world’s largest ever hydropower dam in the ecologically fragile and seismically active Metog county in Tibet over the Yarlung Tsangpo river with investment of $167 billion.
The plan includes five hydropower stations that could produce three times more electricity than the existing world’s largest Three Gorges Dam, already in operation in China.
Beijing, which lays claim to Arunachal Pradesh on the basis of its occupation of Tibet, says it will have no “negative impact” downstream.
“China has never had, and will never have, any intention to use cross-border hydropower projects on rivers to harm the interests of downstream countries or coerce them,” AFP quoted China foreign ministry as saying.
But who can trust China, which is well known for violating signed agreements with impunity, including those with India.
New Delhi fears that China could use its dam as a control tap — to create deadly droughts or release a “water bomb” downstream, the report noted.
To Chief Minister Pema Khandu of Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian plan is a protective action, a “national security necessity”, and a safety valve to control the water.
“China’s aggressive water resource development policy leaves little room for downstream riparian nations to ignore it,” Maharaj K Pandit, a Himalayan ecology specialist at the National University of Singapore, has said.
India’s planned dam could produce 11,200-11,600 megawatts of hydropower, making it the country’s most powerful by a huge margin, and helping to scale back emissions from its coal-dependent electricity grid.
But that is not its primary purpose. “It is meant for water security and flood mitigation; if China seeks to weaponise their dam and use it like a water bomb,” a senior engineer from National Hydropower Corporation (NHPC) — the federal agency contracted to develop the dam – has told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to talk to reporters.
“During the lean season, the reservoir will be filled to capacity, so that it can add in if water is diverted upstream,” the officer has said. “That is the calculation.”
In the rains, water will only reach up two-thirds of the dam wall — so there is capacity to absorb water if released suddenly by China.
India’s former ambassador to Beijing, Ashok K Kantha, has called China’s dam project “reckless” and said that India’s dam, as well as generating power, would be a “defensive measure” against potential attempts “to regulate the flow of water”.
But local opposition in India is stiff. In May, furious Adi tribe villagers blocked NHPC from surveying a proposed site.
Today, government paramilitary forces watch over the charred remains of the drilling machines that protesters torched. But the protests have not stopped, the report said.
Local residents fear that the planned dam would drown dozens of villages.
“If they build a huge dam, the Adi community will vanish from the map of the world,” Likeng Libang, from Yingkiong, a town that even officials say is likely to be entirely underwater, has said.