North by North East: Confront China on Brahmaputra river

Fundamental to the survival of the region and its people is the issue of water and particularly the future of the Brahmaputra. Since the 1990s, concern has grown in India and other countries over plans by the Chinese to dam or divert the Tsanpgo as the Brahmaputra is known in Tibet, where it is born and where it flows for more than half of its long journey to the Bay of Bengal. There are conflicting reports of where and how many dams the Chinese plan to build.

But what is clear is that the Government of India’s response has been weak and fuzzy. All that the Water Resources Secretary (as have his predecessors) has had to say is that “we are watching.”  This is how it is, how it was (remember 1962 and the Chinese blitzkrieg across the borders in Arunachal Pradesh?) and how, unfortunately, it seems that it will be – we will “watch” without coming to any conclusion.

It was as recently as in April this year that External Affairs Minister SM Krishna told Parliament that a “small project” was being built, with a capacity of 540 MW and a cost of 1,138 million yen.  When I traveled across Tibet some years ago, I did not see any projects on the Tsangpo but did not two small hydel projects on streams that flowed into it.

The question is what the Chinese intend to do with the Brahmaputra; after all they are never known for small projects but mega ones like the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, which even the US Corps of Engineers said was impossible to build. But the Chinese did build it, displacing two million people in the process. The displacement did not matter; what was important to Beijing was that the project, buttressing the image of a nation determined to complete its public commitments, no matter the cost.

Even among Chinese academics there is lack of clarity – and agreement — about the dams on the Tsangpo and what should be done about them.  At a workshop in Dhaka earlier this year, three senior Chinese scholars of engineering and hydrology emphasized and re-emphasized that China was not building any dams on the river.  One scholar said that there were only three data gathering stations in one section of the river; that material was then communicated to the Indian Government’s met department at least twice a day so that, especially at times of high rainfall in the summers, the Indians were fed information about scale and velocity of the waters and currents as they moved through the Himalayas into India.

A few weeks after that assertion about no dams, came the External Affairs Minister’s worrying declaration that our neighbour was indeed building one, no matter how small.

This will affect not just Assam and the North-east but also the final recipient of the waters downstream – Bangladesh. India and Bangladesh need to make common cause on this issue – they have been so alienated from each other on Ganges water sharing. The Bramaputra is crucial to their common future and they cannot let China play games with it, just as it has done with the Mekong, the Irrawady and the Salween in South-east Asia, ignoring international norms and rights of downstream riparian states.

Tens of millions of poor and marginalized farmers depend on such cooperation – and on the need to confront China on its effort to control the future of this part of the planet by controlling its water resources.