(TibetanReview.net, Oct16’24) –China’s plan to build the world’s largest hydropower project—the 60,000 MW Motuo mega-dam—on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet, is prompting downstream India to take measures against its potential use as a hydrological weapon, given China’s well-known record for doing so, said an opinion piece posted on the eurasiantimes.com Oct 15.
New Delhi is stated to be worried that the dam will give Beijing the power to control the river flow, which provides drinking water to an estimated 1.8 billion people in countries including China, India, Bhutan, and Bangladesh.
The mega dam will add to the series of other dams China has built to tame the Yarlung Tsangpo, which is known as the Brahmaputra river in India. This “Mother of all Dams” will curtail the river’s flow during the lean season and trigger artificial floods during the rainy season.
India’s response includes a plan to build an 11,000 MW hydropower project on the Siang River in Arunachal’s Upper Siang district. Its design includes a “buffer storage” of over 9 billion cubic metres of water during peak monsoons. This would act as a reserve when water flow is reduced. It will also act as a buffer for downstream areas of Arunachal and Assam if China releases sudden water.
China has a history of using its dams to carry out transnational aggression. The piece noted that in 2021, China cut the water flow of the Mekong River by 50% for three weeks without any prior warning. The flow was cut ostensibly for power-line maintenance, but this affected the millions of people living along the waterways in the Southeast Asian countries of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Also, in 2019, China’s dams in the upper Mekong River basin retained a record amount of water, despite experiencing above-average rainfall in the region during the wet season. Consequently, countries downstream faced an unprecedented drought during this typically wet season.
Since that year, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam have experienced the most severe and prolonged drought on record. The region’s economy and food security have been adversely impacted. Farmers have lost crops, fish populations have dwindled, and reservoir levels have dangerously decreased, the piece noted.
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The Yarlung Tsangpo is one of the world’s largest transnational river systems. It originates in eastern Tibet’s Ngari region, home to the holy Mt Kailash and Lake Mansarovar, flows 2,900 kilometres across southern Tibet along the Himalayas, and enters India through the states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.
In 2017, the water of Siang, a tributary of the Brahmaputra, turned black and became unsuitable for drinking, damaging the ecology and disrupting local agricultural production. Indian officials publicly blamed China. China dismissed the accusations as highly exaggerated, the piece noted.
Building dams in upstream Tibet “enables China to use water as a geopolitical tool, potentially manipulating water levels for irrigation, power generation, or flood control, which has impacted India and Bangladesh,” Neeraj Singh Manhas, Special Advisor for South Parley Policy Initiative, Republic of Korea, has said.
“India’s geographic location, with much of its water originating from rivers flowing from China (Tibet), places it at a disadvantage. India, as a lower riparian state, is dependent on these upstream flows for its agriculture and water security, which makes it vulnerable to any upstream activities by China,” Manhas has added.
He sees India’s recent proposal to build its dam on the Siang as a shift in strategy “aiming to assert its water rights and reduce dependence on China’s actions.” This includes India’s National Hydroelectric Power Corporation building the Upper Siang hydropower project, which would be the country’s biggest hydropower project, with a capacity of 10,000 megawatts.
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While China has been taming the river to generate hydro-power over the past several years, the super dam proposed at the remote stretch of the river known as the Great Bend is the biggest of them all.
The dam’s site is at the eastern reaches of the Himalayas near the disputed border with the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. It is at a place where the river makes a dramatic U-turn. Here, the river elevation drops fiercely over 2,700 meters within a 50 km stretch before it changes course towards India.
China is said to claim that the project is being constructed to increase life quality in Tibet and manage water scarcity while meeting China’s goal of reaching a carbon emission peak before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060.
While that may be so, the dam construction is also seen as being driven by geo-political considerations. In 2016, China obstructed the flow of the Xiabuqu River, a Brahmaputra tributary located in Tibet near the Indian border. On the face of it, the obstruction was done to facilitate the operation of the Lalho hydropower project.
China’s “mother of all dams” is being planned at a time when India is contemplating a review of the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan following the cross-border Uri terrorist attack. “This trend signifies the potential ‘weaponization’ of transboundary water resources, posing a significant threat to regional stability in South Asia,” Manhas and Dr Rahul M Lad were stated to have contended in a recent research paper.
The opinion piece also notes that after the 73-day Doklam border standoff with India in 2017, China “abruptly” ceased to share hydrological data for the Brahmaputra River despite previous agreements. In contrast, Bangladesh continued to receive uninterrupted data from China. This behaviour by China reflects its intent to utilize water resources as a political tool against India within the South Asian context, the piece noted.