More than one year ago, China announced plans to build a series of dams in Tibet, including a hydel power generation plant at Zangmu on the middle reaches of the Brahmaputra. The plan was part of a larger initiative by Beijing to tap Himalayan rivers for hydropower. Tibet’s rivers have remained largely untapped because of the difficult terrain, but with improvements in technology in the past decade, China’s leaders have embarked on a damming spree in the mounta ins of Tibet and Yunnan in the southwest.
The plans will have an impact on the lives of millions in seven countries that lie downstream of these rivers — India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. The dams on the Salween river in Yunnan, by some reports, have already resulted in flooding in the Mekong region downstream. How concerned should India, which lies downstream on the Brahmaputra, be? Work on the Brahmaputra, or Yarlung-Tsangpo as it is known in Tibet, is still in the early stages. China’s projects on this river are of two kinds — one, for hydel power generation, and the more ambitious kind, still in the works, a massive diversion project that envisages diverting the river’s waters to the arid north.
The Zangmu project, which has been in the news in India recently, was publicly announced a year ago, and the contract awarded this March. Some reports have alleged that Beijing was going back on its commitment to India to not divert the Brahmaputra. The Zangmu site is essentially a hydel power project — a ‘run of the river’ power generation project, which experts say is no cause for alarm as it will have little impact on the course of the river downstream.
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