Chennai: After several border face-offs with China this year, it looks like India is to battle it out over water too.
Speaking to Reuters, a senior official from the Union Water Ministry has said that we are planning our own mega-dam project in Arunachal Pradesh, while reports of China looking to damn the Brahmaputra river, have surfaced.
Commissioner at the Department of Water Resources, T S Mehra, stated that the need of the hour is to have a big dam in Arunachal Pradesh to mitigate the adverse impact of the Chinese dam projects.
Mishra said India was planning a 10GW dam, with the proposal under consideration at the ‘highest level in the government’, adding that it would create large-enough storage capacity to offset the impact of the Chinese dams on the water flows.
On the other hand, the Chinese State-run news website, Global Times, has noted that the country’s own plans to dam the river in Tibet had been mentioned in the 14th five-year plan, with China’s Power Construction Corp (POWERCHINA) to head its construction. The report said that Tibet alone contributes around 30 per cent of the water resources (in terms of energy capacity) of China.
“Given that China currently has almost enough power within its borders, it is expected that a large portion of the electricity generated from the project could be exported to neighbouring countries,” it quoted Liu Xiaoxue, an associate research fellow at the National Institute of International Strategy under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
In the Reuters report, Mehra said India had told China that any projects undertaken should not have an adverse effect on India.
“Formally, we are telling them [the Chinese] that any project you undertake, should not cause an adverse impact on India. They have given an assurance, but we don’t know how long their assurance will last,” Mehra said.
This development assumes significance because the armies of both India and China are yet to reach an agreement, with respect to their face-off in Ladakh.