Battle for Water

On December 25, 2024, the state controlled Chinese media Xinhua reported that the Chinese government has approved the construction of a hydropower project in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo river—known, in the downstream, as the Siang in Arunachal Pradesh, as Brahmaputra in Assam and Jamuna river in Bangladesh. The hydropower project is expected to boost local people’s livelihood and prosperity in Southwest China’s Xizang autonomous region. The hydropower project is a green project aimed at promoting low-carbon development, claimed the government.

On December 27, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson in her regular briefing assured that China’s hydropower development in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River aims to speed up developing clean energy, and respond to climate change and extreme hydrological disasters. The hydropower development there has been studied in an in-depth way for decades, and safeguard measures have been taken for the security of the project and ecological environment protection. The project has no negative impact on the lower reaches. China will continue to maintain communication with countries at the lower reaches through existing channels, and step up cooperation on disaster prevention and relief for the benefit of the people by the river, the official statement claimed.

A section of hydrologists are of the opinion that despite China controlling more than half the Brahmaputra basin’s area and building a super dam to control water without consultation with downstream neighbours, water conflict between India and China is less likely due to the unique hydrology of the Brahmaputra basin. They argue that while China controls over half of the basin’s area, most of that area lies in a rain shadow, formed when monsoon winds rise over Himalayan peaks and then descend again onto the Tibetan Plateau. In contrast, the Indian, Bhutanese and Bangladeshi portions of the basin lie in some of the world’s highest precipitation areas, with rainfall consistently above 98 inches per year. In fact, the state of Meghalaya, in the Indian portion of the basin, is often referenced as the wettest place in the world, with 433 inches of annual precipitation in some areas. As a result, China’s contribution to overall flow is undoubtedly lower than its share of basin area. At one extreme, figures from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) put China’s contribution to Brahmaputra flow at 30 per cent while at the other, the Government of India sources put the figure at 7 per cent. Since the Indian portion of the basin is in one of the highest rainfall regions in the world, India has little need to draw from the river now or in the future for agriculture or other purposes. Even India’s most grandiose plans to transfer water out of the basin to more arid areas would have little impact on total flow because of the Brahmaputra’s great volume, analysts argue.

Shortly after China announced its plans for the Yarlung Tsangpo dam project in 2020, a senior Indian government official told Reuters that India’s government was exploring the development of a large hydropower dam and reservoir “to mitigate the adverse impact of the Chinese dam projects”. China’s foreign ministry previously responded to India’s concerns around the proposed dam, saying in 2020 that China has a “legitimate right” to dam the river and has considered downstream impacts.

Reacting on China’s formal announcement on the project, Brahma Chellaney, a geo-strategist and the author of the award-winning book, “Water: Asia’s New Battleground”, commented that ‘the project will impose incalculable environmental costs extending from the Himalayas to the delta in Bangladesh’. According to him, the dam will likely have far-reaching downstream impacts in India and Bangladesh, including altering the cross-border flow and course of the river, which empties into the Bay of Bengal. It will also trap the river’s nutrient-rich silt that helps to naturally fertilise farmlands during the annual monsoonal flooding, as well as sustains marine life. To counter this impending threat, the Deputy Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh, Chowna Mein, claimed that India has planned to construct a dam in the Indian territory when the Siang river enters Arunachal Pradesh. The Upper Siang Hydropower Project is a proposed dam on the Siang River in the Upper Siang district of Arunachal and can produce up to 11,000 MW of electricity. “The Siang dam will counter the Chinese mega-dam on Yarlung Tsangpo. It is for national security and people should understand. We are making people aware of the implications of the Chinese project on our state”, the Minister specified.

The Siang Dam is facing resistance from locals in the area in Arunachal Pradesh. More than 350 individuals, civil society and environmental groups across the country have urged President Droupadi Murmu to withdraw paramilitary forces deployed in Arunachal Pradesh to allegedly “forcefully carry out” surveys for a mega hydropower project, reports NDTV.

It may also be recalled that since 2006, Beijing has been calling Arunachal Pradesh “South Tibet” to assert that it should be part of China which India firmly rejects. Moreover, India claims the Aksai Chin plateau in the Himalayas, which is controlled by China. In September 2023, accreditation to three sportspersons from Arunachal Pradesh for participation in the Hangzhou Asian Games was denied by China. Three women players from Arunachal Pradesh couldn’t travel to Hangzhou as they were not provided the required accreditation by Chinese authorities.

The Yarlung Zangbo super dam: the mother of all dams

The construction of the world’s largest dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo River marks a monumental development in global hydropower infrastructure. This ambitious project, the Medog Hydropower station, is set to reshape the geopolitics of transboundary water resources in South Asia and redefine the eco-system of the region.

According to the Hill, the super-dam’s construction work is already well underway, given that the project received the go-ahead from the country’s parliament in March 2021. Xi’s regime included this dam project in its 2021 five-year economic development plan. The mammoth dam, which passes through Earth’s largest canyon, is being built just before the Himalayan river Yarlung Tsangpo enters into the heavily militarised China-India border at the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is almost three times the area of Taiwan. The new dam project will give China control over cross-border river flows, thus allowing it to leverage its territorial claim to India’s sprawling, Tibet-bordering Arunachal Pradesh.

The super-dam, built in one of the world’s most species-rich mountainous regions that is known as a biodiversity hotspot, threatens to cause lasting damage to these ecosystems, which play a central role in triggering Asia’s annual monsoons. Tibet’s fragile ecosystems are already threatened by climate change and reckless exploitation of the plateau’s vast mineral and water resources. In addition to these, the largest dam is being built close to the geological fault line in a seismically active area where the Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate collide. Building the huge dam close to this fault line makes the project potentially a ticking water bomb for downstream communities, experts warn.

Recent research proposes that parts of the Indian Plate may be delaminating, with its denser lower section peeling away. This theory was supported by data from earthquake waves and gas samples from Tibetan springs. Helium isotopes indicate mantle rocks emerging where the plate separates. The Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates are engaged in a slow-motion collision that began sixty million years ago. This geological clash not only created the mountains but also harbours enigmatic processes deep below the surface.

The super dam will cost around USD 127 billion and will dwarf the biggest dam in the world today, China’s own Three Gorges Dam, whose reservoir is longer than the largest of North America’s Great Lakes. When completed, this super-dam in south-eastern Tibet will generate up to 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity yearly — more than triple the 88.2 billion installed capacity of the Three Gorges Dam. Located in central China, the Three Gorges Dam officially uprooted 1.4 million residents to make way for its mammoth reservoir, which submerged two cities, 114 towns and 1,680 villages. NASA reports that the construction and operation of the Three Gorges Dam have slightly slowed the Earth’s rotation by 0.06 microseconds due to the redistribution of water mass.

Though the Chinese state media has described this as “a safe project that prioritises ecological protection”, saying it will boost local prosperity and contribute to Beijing’s climate neutrality goals, the human rights groups and locals have raised concerns. Among them are fears that the construction of the dam could displace local communities, as well as significantly alter the natural landscape and damage local ecosystems. Reports indicate that the colossal development would require at least four 20km-long tunnels to be drilled through the Namcha Barwa mountain, diverting the flow of the Yarlung Tsangpo, Tibet’s longest river.

Large dams: a ticking water bomb

In early June, 1938, Chinese troops were ordered by the Chinese President Chiang Kai-Shek to destroy the dykes along the Yellow River—a symbol of Chinese civilisation, with the hope that the resulting floods would halt invading Japanese forces. It was done in a panic mode as Japan’s rapid and devastating invasion of China continued inward. The result was cataclysmic. Thousands of square miles of agricultural land were destroyed, at least half a million were killed and millions were displaced. The victims were almost all Chinese citizens. The floods did little to stop the invasion. Today, China has adapted this strategy of weaponising water, now for political gains, writes Berkeley Political Review.

Weaponisation of water by building big dams and barrages on rivers is not new. Cyrus the Great reputedly took Babylon in a single night in the 6th century BC, by diverting an old artificial lake back into the Euphrates, so that his army could come right up to the city walls at night. Hulagu, the destroyer of medieval Baghdad, used the Tigris River’s flood waters to trap the caliph’s horsemen outside the city walls. In the 1980s, both Iran and Iraq used water as an area denial weapon to check the other’s advance in the southern marshlands. Iran tried to bomb Iraq dams out of commission. More recently, in April 2014, fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria captured the Nuaimiyah Dam in western Iraq, despite earlier efforts to defend the site. They then overflowed it to dislodge Iraqi soldiers dug in upstream of the site—and to deny drinking water to civilians downstream. It is alleged that in 2023, Russia deliberately destroyed the Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, creating “the largest man-made disaster in Europe in decades.” This unleashed heavy flooding across southern Ukraine. The Ukrainian authorities evacuated thousands of people from flood-hit areas of Kherson region, in the south of the country. The Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy termed the attack as an attempt at “ecocide,” saying that around 150 tonnes of oil had contaminated the floodwaters and run off into the Black Sea.

For nearly 70 years, China has controlled the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau — the largest freshwater reserve outside the polar ice caps and origin of the continent’s ten greatest rivers — which two billion people rely on. Though domestic rivers are becoming oversaturated to the point of decay with dams, yet the dam building frenzy shows no signs of slowing. Instead, Beijing has begun to dam international rivers. Unsatisfied with the 87,000 dams within its borders, China has been financing international hydropower projects that will power its own southern grids, while avoiding the environmental and social costs of hydropower in its own territory. The Chinese built dams on the Mekong River is a case in point.

Known as the ‘Mother of Waters’, in Laos and Thailand, Mekong flows from the Chinese controlled Tibetan Plateau to South China Sea through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam—Asia’s Rice Bowl where farmers produce, every year, enough rice to feed over 300 million people. In addition to this the Mekong basin produces 25 per cent of the world’s fresh water fishes. This vital river is now under threat as China has built many big dams near the border of the Tibetan Plateau before crossing the international border. It is reported that China has built 11 giant dams on the Mekong River (and is constructing or planning at least eight more), thereby gaining geopolitical leverage over its Southeast Asian neighbours, but also wrecking serious environmental harms, including recurrent droughts, in the downriver basin. In 2016, when the Mekong River was drying up, China distributed “emergency water flows” from its dams to revitalise the river. To Southeast Asians, this wasn’t an act of generosity, but a concerning reminder that their water is subject to the will of a hegemonic neighbour who uses its control over upstream dams — and access to water — as a bargaining tool. The same fates might wait for the people of India and Bangladesh though various reports suggest that China controls only a meagre per cent of water that flows through Brahmaputra.

Observations

Construction of another dam on Brahmaputra (Siang) at Arunachal Pradesh to mitigate the impact of the Chinese dam is not a viable solution to this serious issue. Such a move will aggravate the problem. Large dams and barrages on any free flowing river are usually built for the benefits of those who live upstream. And those who reside downstream are usually the losers. However, in the long run, everyone loses due to irreparable damages caused to the river and its surrounding ecosystem. This is true for dams and barrages built in Tibet and India. Farakka barrage on river Ganga before it enters Bangladesh and multipurpose dams on river Damodar in Jharkhand before it flows to West Bengal are cases in point. The same is true for dams in Nepal. In every rainy season, water released from the overflowing Kosi Barrage and the Mandar dam floods the Bihar state of India.

Unfortunately, India and China are not parties to the UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Water Courses (1997). However, while exercising the riparian right to use water in its territory, the States are under an obligation not to cause significant harm to the river flow, as pronounced by the International Court of Justice. If the States consent, the world court may adjudicate.

The best option before India to ensure its water security is to enter into a water treaty with China to avoid any future conflict due to weaponisation of water by the latter. Before that, India must revisit its existing treaties with neighbouring countries to ensure an equitable share of water of its transnational rivers.

Views expressed are personal