A
view across the Brahmaputra near Sukhleswar Ghat, Guwahati, India. Photo by
Deepraj, Wikipedia Commons
For
India, disturbing news has come from the Himalayas. China has announced that it
would block the water of the river Xiabuku, a tributary of the Brahmaputra
River (called Yarlung Tsangpo in China) in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) in
order to construct a dam which will be a part and parcel of the Lalho
hydro-electric project at a place called Xigaze, very near to Sikkim.
There are two causes of worry for
India. First, the already commissioned Zangmu hydro power plant and three other
proposed such projects in Dagu, Jiexu and Jiacha, all in the TAR, may not be
run-of-the-river type as declared by China and believed to be true by India.
Secondly, China’s policy declarations in regard to Tibetan rivers show signs of
constant shifts and so the possibility of Beijing one day declaring its resolve
to divert the Brahmaputra waters from Tibet to northern parts of China may not
be discounted.
The Chinese announcement has come at
a time when India has carried out surgical military strikes into Pakistan and
there are broad hints from government circles that India may revisit the Indus
Water Treaty which ensures supply of Indus waters to Pakistan. Beijing is
perhaps sending a message across that a large part of northeastern India is
dependent on Chinese mercy so far as Brahmaputra waters are concerned.
For a long time, China denied
construction of the Zangmu hydro power dam but ultimately admitted its
conceptualization and progress of construction in as late as 2010 after
consistent queries from not just India but some other nations also. Moreover
all the dams mentioned above are quite close to each other, in some cases
within 20 miles, in the middle reaches of the Brahmaputra and are bound to
obstruct free flow of the river water. Moreover even if the projects at Zangmu,
Dagu, Jiexu and Jiacha are run-of-the-river types they are required to store
huge amount of water and thus may deprive the north-eastern India of the
nutrient rich silt of the Brahmaputra that makes the Assam plains so fertile.
A more serious cause of worry is the
actual number of hydro-electric dams being built over the Brahmaputra in TAR.
Jana Jagriti, an Assam based non-governmental organization, avers that China is
building up thirty five dams on the Brahmaputra- eight on the mainstream river
and twenty seven on the tributaries- while Michael Buckley, a Canadian
environmentalist, thinks that a five dam cascade will soon come up in the mid
reaches of the Brahmaputra and twenty more dams are in the pipeline.
But China has no other way but to
exploit more and more its energy and water resources in order to keep its fast
paced capitalist development going. In its just concluded twelfth five year
plan Beijing had fixed a target of 120 million kilowatt of electricity
generation, a staggering amount by any standard. For achieving this it has no
other way but to fall back on hydro electricity.
This raises the all-important
question: will China go ahead with the Medog hydro power plant? This project
alone aims to generate anything between 38-49 gigawatts of hydro-electricity
while India’s total installed capacity is 33 gigawatts only. This project will
be located near the Great Bend of the Brahmaputra where the mighty river enters
India after a great U turn and a 2000 metres fall through the deepest canyon in
the world near Mount Namcha Barwa.
Medog hydro power plant will give
India sleepless night. It will be situated close to Arunachal Pradesh and is
expected to suck a great amount of the Brahmaputra water before it enters
India. Secondly, it entails destruction of vast pristine forests. Thirdly all
the hydro power projects mentioned above are situated in geologically unstable
areas which are prone to earthquakes. So if an earthquake visits any one of
these hydro power dams, like the one under whose impact the Three Gorges Dam on
the Yangtze River had given away in 2008, there will be large scale flood and
loss of lives in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.
The threat is real and close at
hand. On March 1, 2012 the river Siang (this is how the Brahmaputra is known in
Arunachal Pradesh) had run completely dry at a place called Pasighat where it
used to be several kilometers wide. Although the river picked up momentum later
on yet it is still a pale shadow of its former self.
But there is no dearth of naiveté on
the part of the Indian government. Manmohan Singh, the previous UPA prime
minister, had assured the nation that there was no need to worry as the Chinese
dams are run-of-the-river type. But well after this assurance Salman Khurshid,
a previous external affairs minister, admitted the government of India’s
insufficient knowledge about the exact nature of these Chinese projects. A
decision was made to constitute an inter-departmental committee – comprising of
representatives from defence, external affairs and the department of space –
for taking up the matter with China.
To all intents and purposes, the
initiative stopped there. Now, will the Narendra Modi government revive it? Or
does it have a different plan?
*Amitava Mukherjee is a senior
journalist and commentator
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