The last week of 2024 brought news that the Chinese government had approved the construction of a hydropower dam on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo river. The announcement has raised concerns and eyebrows in India over the project’s hydrological and environmental consequences downstream.
The Yarlung Tsangpo originates in Tibet and flows into India. In India, the river is known as the Siang in the state of Arunachal Pradesh and the Brahmaputra in neighboring Assam state. The river then flows into Bangladesh, where it is joined by the Ganga. It finally empties itself into the Bay of Bengal.
The timing of the Chinese announcement on the dam is curious; it came weeks after India and China announced a thaw in ties, which had been in a deep freeze since the bloody clashes in Galwan Valley in the western sector of their disputed border in June 2020.
Following a meeting between Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi on December 18, an Indian government statement said they had discussed “data sharing on trans-border rivers,” among other issues. It is unclear whether this included any discussions on the latest dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo river.
India’s reaction to the Chinese announcement was noticeably sharp. On January 3, Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said that as a “lower riparian state with established user rights to the waters of the river, we have consistently expressed, through expert-level as well as diplomatic channels, our views and concerns to the Chinese side over mega projects on rivers in their territory.”
India’s concerns were reiterated “along with need for transparency and consultation with downstream countries,” Jaiswal told reporters at a regular foreign office briefing. “The Chinese side has been urged to ensure that the interests of downstream states of the Brahmaputra are not harmed by activities in upstream areas,” he said.
Plans for a new dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo date back at least a decade. But the new reports have nevertheless spawned questions and concerns, including worries about the impact on lives and livelihoods of people in India’s Northeast, including the states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam.
The proposed dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo could potentially produce 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, according to an estimate by the Power Construction Corp of China in 2020. This is three times the designed power capacity of the Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest dam, in central China.
For some in India, the announcement of the new dam’s construction, on the heels of Doval’s travel to China for the first time in five years to rebuild strategic trust badly damaged by the 2020 faceoff in the Himalayas, is another sign of Chinese perfidy.
It was in October that India and China announced a pull-back of their troops from eyeball to eyeball confrontation in Ladakh in the Himalayas. The Asian giants share a 4,000-kilometer-long undemarcated border, the source of friction for decades. It led to a brief but bloody war in 1962 and several face-offs since, the worst being the Galwan clash, which claimed Indian and Chinese lives.
It was only after the troop disengagement in October-November 2024 that signs of a thaw slowly became visible with the two countries resuming dialogue at the level of special representatives after a gap of five years.
According to analyst Brahma Chellaney, the announcement of the new dam so soon after Doval’s visit to stabilize ties shows that a thaw is nowhere near. “China has a record of starting transnational river projects in secrecy and it’s only when its work can no longer be hidden from commercially available satellite reconnaissance, it finally admits the project is underway,” Chellaney said.
China’s occupation of Tibet makes it an “upstream controller” of seven South Asian rivers including the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Yangtze, and Mekong, which flow into Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. This gives Beijing undue leverage over the lower riparian countries, Chellaney said. But China does not have water-sharing pacts with any of its downstream neighbors.
According to a Lowy Institute report, “India needs to assess how China might ‘weaponize’ its advantage over those countries downstream. Control over these rivers effectively gives China a chokehold on India’s economy.” The report goes on to point out that China could block or divert water, pollute the rivers, or withhold data that could warn of floods and other problems downstream.
In 2002, India and China signed an agreement on sharing hydrological data. It was renewed subsequently, but in 2017, China refused to share information during another China-India standoff in Doklam.
Meanwhile, a second line of thinking in New Delhi is that few details are yet available about the dam. If it is a run-of-the-river project, India does not have much to worry about. In addition, rains in India’s Northeast make up most of the volume of the water in the Brahmaputra’s tributaries that feed the river there. The latter argument parallels one presented by the Washington-based U.S. Institute for Peace think tank in a 2022 paper.
“While China controls most 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,” the USIP said.
India’s sharp reaction to the Chinese news report on the dam was due to New Delhi’s need to register its protest, said a person familiar with the matter.
“China needs to know that as a lower riparian state, we have a right to protest upstream activities that could have a bearing on us in the future,” the source said. “We are definitely keeping an eye on this development,” he said, refusing to speculate on whether this would impact any forthcoming engagements with China.
Perhaps one thing that both India and China could do before water becomes a contentious issue between the two countries is to update agreements already signed, besides starting a separate dialogue dedicated to river water management to fix the communication gaps.
In a recent article in Hindustan Times, former Indian Ambassador to China Ashok Kantha has called for including the new dam in the ambit of the China-India dialogue. “We can explore whether India-China relations can be managed in a less confrontational manner and without lowering the bar to seek an elusive détente,” he noted, adding that “there is today possibly greater tactical readiness in both India and China to engage with each other.”
That should help reduce one more potential irritant from clouding an already complicated relationship between the two Asian neighbors. But this, of course, will depend on political will on both sides.