China’s bid to tame a ‘rogue’ river

China’s ambitious hydropower dam in Tibet was approved on 25 December 2024. Mooted in 2010, it was included in China’s 14th Five-Year Plan in 2020. Proposed across the Yarlung Tsangpo (the Tibetan name for the Brahmaputra), the world’s biggest hydro-electricity project is also being described as the ‘biggest investment in a single project on the planet’ at an estimated cost of USD 137 billion.

It would dwarf China’s Three Gorges Dam — currently the world’s largest — and generate 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. The location is a Himalayan gorge where the river plunges some 6,560 feet along a section called the ‘Great Bend’ before making a U-turn into Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and, thereafter, Bangladesh.

Sources say the proposed site is on the left bank of the river that morphs from the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet to the Siang in Arunachal and the Brahmaputra in Assam. While it is unclear when construction will begin, China has sought to allay fears that the project would harm the ecology of the region and the interests of lower riparian countries like India, Bhutan and Bangladesh. It is from Bangladesh, the lowermost riparian nation, that the river drains into the Bay of Bengal.

A Chinese spokesperson stated that the project was approved after decades of rigorous scientific studies and would have no adverse impact on countries downstream. Soon after the reassurance, on 7 January 2025, Tibet was struck by an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale. With at least 126 deaths and countless injured and homeless, the earthquake revived fears that the project would be catastrophic.

The Indian government has reacted with caution, partly because India has been threatening to take unilateral steps by building dams on the Indus river, which would choke the water flowing into Pakistan, a lower riparian state on the Indus. (There is a treaty between India and Pakistan on the Indus but none on the Brahmaputra.)

Indian intelligence agencies said on News18 channel that the dam planned by China was “a weapon without artillery”, adding that the “construction will be dangerous and will impact geology because drilling will hit tectonic plates, which could cause earthquakes”. The official announcement caused consternation in both Arunachal Pradesh (claimed by China as part of Tibet) and Assam.

Assam Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi said, “Ten years ago, in Parliament, I had raised [this] urgent issue... I had also highlighted that, as per global convention, China can claim greater right of access to the Brahmaputra. A decade later, it appears the concerns were not taken seriously.”

Fellow Assam Congress MP Pradyut Bordoloi recalled an inter-ministerial group anticipating the crisis in 2012 and recommending a Brahmaputra River Basin Board. Both Gogoi and Bordoloi point out that in the absence of a water-sharing treaty between China and India, we are in a vulnerable position. Bordoloi feels it is still not too late to constitute a body with other lower-riparian countries like Bhutan and Bangladesh as members. Such a group, he argues, would be able to draw international attention and put pressure on China.

Speaking to the Voice of America, Srikanth Kondapalli, professor of Chinese Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, said, “China acts unilaterally on issues related to trans-boundary rivers that originate in their territory,” adding that questions arise about a dam being built in such a contested and fragile area.

“The region proposed… is highly susceptible to landslides and is located on a geological fault line that intersects the Yarlung Zangbo,” said Y. Nithiyanandam, head of the Geospatial Research Programme at the Takshashila Institution in Bengaluru.

“Planning a dam of this magnitude in such complex terrain poses significant risks to downstream regions of India and Bangladesh, especially in the event of a mishap or… any alteration in the water flow,” VOA reported.

India has countered China with its own dam announcement: the Siang Dam on the Upper Siang river in Arunachal Pradesh, touted as our largest. Meanwhile, Bhutan has been planning and building several medium to small dams, causing ripples of concern in downstream India and Bangladesh.

None of the riparian nations of the Brahmaputra river basin have, however, signed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses of 2014; hence first user-rights on river systems are non-enforceable. Writing in the Hindu, Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman, visiting associate fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi, points to the 1950 earthquake which had its epicentre at Medog in Tibet.

It changed the riparian landscape trapped until then by an unending cycle of catastrophic floods. Quoting Philip Ball’s Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China, he reminds us that the Chinese have historically viewed Yarlung Zangbo as a ‘river gone rogue’. (Probably because the river turns sharply from west to east at the Great Bend to flow south into India.) China, Rahman writes, ‘is going ahead with building mega-dams in Tibet to correct this geographical anomaly by disciplining a “rogue river”’.

While India too has harboured ambitious plans of constructing dams, barrages, embankments and hydropower plants in the Brahmaputra river basin, experts warn about the futility of India committing vast resources to compete with China. This is what China may actually want.

With China sitting pretty on top of Asia’s water tower, with complete control over Tibet’s rivers and the material, military and technological might to have its own way, a dam for a dam may not be the right response, writes Rahman. ‘Transboundary river systems are often likened by nation states to “taps”, which they think can be closed or opened through hydraulic interventions such as dams within their respective nation-states. The Brahmaputra river system has been the site of planned and ongoing mega-dam projects by China, India and Bhutan, all contributing to an intense geopolitical power projection in the river basin… highly dramatised terms such as “water wars” are part of the geopolitical vocabulary and upstream hydropower dams are viewed as “water bombs” by lower riparian nations, as in the case of the Medog dam project.’

Has the Indian government been blindsided? Should they have seen it coming? In December 2016, then MoS M.J. Akbar had spoken of water experts from India and China meeting regularly since 2006; following an agreement signed in 2013, hydrological data were also exchanged between the two countries. At the 10th such meeting in April 2016, China had assured India that hydropower plants being built posed no threat to the flow of the Brahmaputra. It is not clear though whether such exchanges continued after the Galwan clash in 2020.

Meanwhile, glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) have increased in the Himalayas. The Chungthang Dam collapse in Sikkim in October 2023 caused widespread damage to life and property. Dams being built across the Himalayas affect agropastoral communities, biodiversity and wetland systems. Threats to the Brahmaputra river basin by the world’s largest dam are very real and India would have to move very quickly to address them, and thrash out, if not a treaty, at least a working arrangement with China.