Chinese dams in Tibet raise hackles in India

China needs energy for its industrial heartland and to develop the Tibetan plateau. Chellaney argues that the country has an established policy of trying to corner the natural resources that its growing economy needs — whether from its own back yard or from as far afield as Africa or Latin America.

From the Yangtze to the Mekong and now the Brahmaputra, Chinese dam-building follows a well-established pattern that starts with small dams on a river’s upper reaches and eventually moves to mega-dams downstream, Chellaney said. There are 12 small dams on the Brahmaputra’s upper reaches and tributaries and one medium-size dam under construction on the river, said Chellaney, predicting that the next step will be larger dams in spots where the river picks up huge amounts of water and momentum nearer the Indian border.

China dams in Tibet

Latest stories from Foreign

Sibling spy intrigue puts spotlight on S. Korea’s wary eye toward defectors

Chico Harlan

Yoo Woo-sung made strides in Seoul. Then his sister told interrogators he was on a mission for the North.

Without U.S. air support, Afghans struggle to save their wounded

Kevin Sieff

More lives are at risk as the U.S. helicopters that the Afghan army has relied on to transport its injured leave.

World Digest: May 19, 2013

Accused U.S. spy flies out of Moscow; North Korea launches projectile into eastern waters.

Activists bristle as India cracks down on foreign funding of NGOs

Rama Lakshmi

Government bars groups that oppose nuclear energy, human rights abuses from accepting overseas donations.

In Iran, opponents use age to attack Rafsanjani campaign

Jason Rezaian

Having attacked Rafsanjani on every conceivable point, Iran’s conservatives play the age card.

Those dams could not only affect water flows but also remove nutrient-rich silt that helps nourish agriculture downstream, he said.

The nightmare scenario for India is that China would one day have the engineering expertise to divert the river at its Great Bend, where it makes a hairpin turn through a gorge many times as deep as the Grand Canyon before rushing into India.

Such an idea has circulated in China for some time, but it is a practical impossibility even for the Chinese, said Mohan Guruswamy of the Center for Policy Alternatives in New Delhi. He said such a project would potentially require nuclear explosions to blow up mountains and the construction of a string of nuclear power plants to haul the water over the higher reaches of the Tibetan plateau.

Guruswamy said many of India’s popular concerns are born of ignorance and a strong dose of jingoism. The Brahmaputra picks up the vast majority of its water a long way downstream from the proposed dams, he said, and India uses only 5 percent of the waters as the river, six miles wide in some places, glides by on its way to Bangladesh.

New Delhi is monitoring the river’s flow as it enters Indian territory but is not overly concerned, said a government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject.

As a rising global power, China has shrinking incentive to unilaterally dam rivers to its neighbors’ disadvantage, the official said.

“This sort of thing wouldn’t behoove a country that aspires to be a major player,” he said.

Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington said tensions could rise as climate change melts the Himalayan glaciers and changes the patterns of water distribution in Asia. The risk is that China then takes a larger share of diminished rivers, magnifying the effects of climate change on downstream nations such as India.

And because the upstream power also has military, strategic and economic advantages, many observers say India has minimal bargaining power.

“India has very little leverage over China, and this is just one more lever that China is acquiring,” said Harsh Pant of the defense studies department at King’s College London.

Zhang Jie in Beijing contributed to this report.