India should craft a calibrated response to China’s Yarlung dam project

This month, China’s top leaders announced the formation of the Yajiang Group, a new state enterprise charged with the construction of this project in Medog county, just north of the boundary with India’s Arunachal Pradesh, at an estimated cost of $167 billion. 

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Comprising five dams, the Yajiang-Yaxia project will divert some of the water flow from the gorge where the Yarlung river does a U-bend into a system of tunnels, to generate 60 gigawatts of power, supplying electricity to 300 million people and creating 100,000 jobs for Han migrants in the Tibetan region. 

According to official Chinese reports, the project is “an important measure to implement the overall national security concept, the new energy security strategy and the Party’s strategy of governing Xizang (sic) in the new era.” While Beijing has advertised the project as intended to sell electricity to external markets, it is revealing that national security finds place as the first of its stated objectives.

After the Yarlung flows into Indian territory, it is joined by other tributaries and becomes the mighty Brahmaputra. That is why many in India and Bangladesh were alarmed when talk about this project began around a decade ago. 

Since then, several studies have shown that the Brahmaputra is really an Indian river, as it gathers most of its water after it enters Indian territory. Many of these studies are based on data that is a couple of decades old. Even so, it is sufficient to reassure us that China cannot choke the water supply and livelihoods of Northeast India and Bangladesh. 

At worst, it has the power to manipulate some of the water flow, but this is well within India’s capacity to adapt to. Similarly, while water flow can be controlled in service of military objectives, battlefield scenarios where this can be employed along the Medog-Arunachal Pradesh region are contrived and limited.

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This does not mean India should ignore the threat. Rather, it means that New Delhi must strengthen the risk management approach that is already at play in border regions. 

India’s response should be to build a system of dams, buffers and channels that can serve both economic and security functions. The timetable for this should be calibrated to observe Chinese actions and designed to manage the risks from them. 

Since Beijing has no interest in performing its customary duty under international law—affirmed by the International Court of Justice in its climate-change verdict last week—to cooperate with its lower riparian neighbour, India’s infrastructure response must come from observation and  analysis.

 To be able to do that well, India’s government, especially its national security establishment, must invest in geospatial intelligence and analytical capacity. Our homegrown space and geospatial industries have an important role to play in this effort.

Even if the Chinese companies execute the project at the advertised quality and safety levels, it is inevitable that the construction phase will pollute the river and ecology of the region. We should expect higher levels of debris and sediment, which could have long-term consequences for the population of Arunachal Pradesh and other states downstream. This is the part that Indian diplomacy should focus on: to get China to cooperate in a way that minimizes permanent environmental damage and allows populations time and space to adapt to the changes. 

Beijing’s track record on sharing information is terrible. In the Mekong Valley arrangement in South East Asia, it shares basic hydrological information a grand total of two times a year. However, considering the global climate  situation and the fact that both Chinese and Indian people would be rendered vulnerable, it is worthwhile for Indian diplomacy to pursue this angle. So too for disaster management. 

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The worst damage China is doing is to its own reputation and long-term geopolitical interests. It is well within its rights to build dams in its territory. But doing so without informing its downstream neighbour is clearly imperious behaviour. New Delhi cannot stop Beijing from building these dams, but where India has room—such as on the resolution of the Tibetan question, Taiwan, global trade and relations with the US—it is bound to respond to Beijing’s high-handedness.

It will make a grand rapprochement between the two Asian giants that much harder. In the meantime, Indian citizens and leaders will see the Yarlung project as yet another unfriendly if not hostile act, and this will colour both popular perceptions and foreign policy. Unfortunate, but true.

Tailpiece: A senior member of Delhi’s strategic establishment once told me, “It is the weak who protest loudly. The strong do something about it.” 

The author is co-founder and director of The Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy.