By Sudha Ramachandran

BANGALORE – China’s dam-building spree has lower riparian countries worried. There is concern in India’s northeast and Bangladesh that its construction of dams on the Yarlung Tsangpo River (known as the Brahmaputra in India) and possible storage and diversion of its waters will leave little water for them, rendering the region parched.

The dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo is at Zangmu in Tibet. The project is being executed by Gezhouba Corporation, one of China’s biggest engineering and construction companies and is expected to be complete by December 2015.

The Yarlung Tsangpo begins in the Jima Yangzong glacier in southwestern Tibet. It flows eastward at a height of 4,000 meters

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// ]]>// <![CDATA[// through southern Tibet for around 1,600 kilometers. At its easternmost point, it makes a spectacular u-turn known as the Shuomatan Point or the Great Bend, before it enters India’s eastern-most state, Arunachal Pradesh. In Arunachal it is known as the Siang. There it is joined by the Dibang and Lohit rivers and called the Brahmaputra. The Brahmaputra snakes its way through Assam into Bangladesh, where it is joined by the Ganga. The Ganga and the Brahmaputra then go on to create the world’s largest delta before emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

Chinese officials say the dam at Zangmu is a hydropower project only. Indian officials admit there is “nothing objectionable per se” about the Zangmu project “as it is 1,100 kilometers from the Sino-Indian boundary and a run-of-the-river project”.

Following his visit to China recently, India’s External Affairs Minister Somanahalli Malliah Krishna told parliament that his Chinese counterpart had assured him that “there would be no water storage at the dam and it would not in any way impact the river’s downstream flow into northeast India”.

Some observers in India say India’s unhappiness over the Chinese dams and other infrastructure projects is a case of sour grapes. They say that being a laggard itself in improving hydropower, road, rail and other infrastructure near its borders, India is wrong to quibble about China’s energetic pursuit of infrastructure in the border regions.

Others have argued that Indian anxieties over China’s diversion of Tsangpo’s water are excessive. According to Romesh Bhattacharji, a retired bureaucrat, before the river enters India, it is “smallish”.

[I]t picks up considerable waters from the Yangsang Chu at Jidu, the Siyom and the Sipi at Yembung and several others before it leaves the hills at Passighat.

Around this place it more than doubles its size with the waters from the Lohit and the Dibong. After that its right bank gets the Himalayan rivers like the massive Subansisiri, the wide Kamala, the Rong, the Kameng (Bharoli), Aie, the Saralbhanga and about 40 others. Its south bank too gets waters from copious rivers like the Burhi Dihing, Namdang, Dhansiri, Kalang, Kopili, Digaru, Bajbala and 30 others. These make the mighty Brahmaputra the size that it is. Not Chinese waters.

This would mean that whether or not China diverts water from the Yarlung Tsangpo, the Brahmaputra will remain a mighty river and India’s Northeast and Bangladesh will not be deprived of water.

But many in the country do not think so.

“Whether China goes for big or small hydel [hydro-electric] projects, it will definitely have an impact on the flow of Brahmaputra in northeastern region,” Partha J Das, head of Aaranyak’s Water, Climate and Hazard Program told the Times of India. Aaranyak is a non-governmental organization based in Guwahati in Assam that is involved in environmental and related issues.

More worrying than the project at Zangmu is what Beijing plans to do with the Yarlung Tsangpo in the coming years.

It is believed that China is planning to divert water at the Great Bend as part of a larger hydro-engineering project, the South-to-North Water Diversion scheme. The logic behind the water diversion plan is simple. Over a quarter of China is classified as desert. The north and northwest of the country, where 35% of China’s huge population lives, has only 7% of the country’s water resources. Growing population needs, rapid industrialization and serious water pollution have accentuated the water crisis. To ease the water woes of northern China, water from southern rivers could be diverted.

The South-to-North Water Diversion project envisages drawing water from rivers in southern China and diverting them to the north along three routes. The central and eastern routes will not impact India.

However, the third – the western route – could affect the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions in India’s northeast and Bangladesh. It will involve drawing water from several rivers that originate in Tibet including the Tsangpo. A dam is to be built at the Great Bend.

If China goes ahead with these plans to divert the waters of the Tsangpo, it will spell disaster for the ecology and hydrology of vast areas in the Indian northeast as well as in Bangladesh, where millions depend on the Brahmaputra’s waters for their survival and livelihoods. Many will be forced to migrate. This is expected to fuel more ethnic conflicts in the region, where many are already underway.

There is concern too in India that several hydropower projects that will soon begin work in Arunachal Pradesh could run into trouble if the Tsangpo’s waters are diverted. It “will put almost 40% of India’s hydel potential in trouble,” said S Padmanabhan, a power consultant.

Of India’s hydropower potential of 150,000 megawatts (MW), 50,000 MW is in the northeast. And Arunachal Pradesh, which is “mainly fed by Brahmaputra’s tributaries – Siang, Subansiri and Lohit – supports development of 28,500 MW hydro projects,” he points out.

The Brahmaputra is fed mainly by waters of melting Himalayan glaciers. Its hydrological flow is therefore reduced during winters and this affects power generation during the winter months. A move by China to divert its water at the Great Bend will reduce hydrological flow even during currently normal periods, Padmanabhan says. The prospect is likely making investors in the planned Indian hydropower projects wary.

There is concern too that diverting the Tsangpo’s waters will shatter India’s own dreams of diverting the water of its northern rivers to feed the country’s drier south and west. The Brahmaputra accounts for 29% of the total run-off of all India’s rivers and its waters are central to the success of the National River Linking Project (NRLP).

While the river linking project has been put in cold storage for now given the huge financial and technological challenges, as well as the environmental costs it would entail, Tsangpo’s diversion will rule out forever India’s grandiose dreams of linking rivers to address the country’s water woes, Water Ministry officials fear.

Meanwhile, work has begun on the central and eastern routes of China’s water diversion project. Soaring costs and problems related to the displacement of millions have slowed the pace of its implementation and the project on these two routes is running behind schedule. Work on the western route is yet to begin and feasibility studies are not even complete. Several Chinese engineers believe that given the difficult terrain, there are huge technological challenges that must be overcome.

Indian officials say that unlike India, where protests, bureaucratic delays and inadequate funds stand in the way of implementation of projects, China does not negotiate with public opposition to projects and has the will and necessary technological and financial resources to take the Brahmaputra diversion project forward.

Indian officials say that what fuels anxieties in the region is China’s reluctance to share information, its lack of transparency on issues like its dam building. For instance, for several years Beijing denied it was building a dam at Zangmu. It is only recently that it came around to admitting to it.

China’s firm denials that it is considering water diversion at Great Bend or that it will do anything to undermine India’s interests, therefore, have few takers in India.

Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.