CHENNAI: For more than 20 years now, the Three Gorges Dam in China’s Hubei Province has stood out as an engineering marvel. This massive hydropower project, built on Yangtze River, can hold 40 billion cubic metres of water, enough to fill several million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Its sheer size has sparked claims, not without scientific basis, of it slowing the speed of the earth’s spin. The Three Gorges Dam is easily the world’s largest. But it will end up being pushed to a distant second place as China this week approved the mother of all hydropower projects.
The new project, to be built on the Brahmaputra River, is expected to generate three times the power produced by the Three Gorges Dam. It will come up at the point in the Himalayan reaches in Tibet’s Medog County, where the river makes a sharp U-turn to flow into Arunachal Pradesh. The proposed site is not very far from the disputed border with India.
Beijing first announced plans to build the dam in 2020. China said it will generate more than 300 billion kWh of electricity each year, which, as per reports, is enough to meet the annual needs of more than 300 million people.
India’s concerns
India has closely watched Chinese constructions on the Brahmaputra. There are concerns that such activities may slow or reduce the flow of water to India. “We have urged them to ensure that the interest of downstream states isn’t harmed,” a Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson said in 2020.
India and China don’t have any agreements on sharing trans-border river water. The two countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in 2002 for sharing hydrological information on the Brahmaputra River during the flood seasons. In 2006, the two established the Expert Level Mechanism (ELM) to discuss various issues related to trans-border rivers. However, these arrangements were disrupted as India-China ties strained amid border tensions. For instance, in the aftermath of the 2013 Doklam standoff, Beijing suspended data sharing, which resumed only in 2018.
There are concerns that China could weaponise the reservoir during times of conflict either by using it to cause floods or induce droughts. Analysts have warned that it could divert the Brahmaputra north to China at the U-turn point. “China is also building five dams on the Brahmaputra river, and it is feared that directional blasting techniques could be used to divert the Brahmaputra north to China at the u-bend” before it enters India through Arunachal Pradesh,” US think tank Lowy Institute said in a report.
Seismic zone
The site of the dam frequently experiences earthquakes as it is located over tectonic plates. “Consistent and severe seismic activity combined with the concentration of dam construction on the Tibetan plateau could have catastrophic effects if an earthquake causes a dam to fail, creating a domino effect, as a surge of water collapses cascades of dams further downstream,” said a report by China Water Risk, a Hong Kong-based think tank. It is also one of the rainiest parts of mainland China.