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Note on China’s Reported Move on River Brahmputra: Implications for India

China’s reported move to build a series of dams in Tibet, including a hydel power generation plant at Zangmu on the middle reaches of the Brahmaputra, as per media reports, is a very serious issue entailing far-reaching implications for India. The plan has been part of a larger Chinese initiative to tap Himalayan rives for hydropower. Tibet’s rivers had remained largely untapped owing to the difficult terrain, but with improvements in technology in recent years, China has embarked on an ambitious plan to tap fresh water in Tibet.

The Tibetan Plateau is a landscape of enormous glaciers, huge alpine lakes, and mighty waterfalls – a storehouse of freshwater so bountiful that the region serves as the headwaters for many of Asia’s largest rivers, including the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Salween, and Sutlej, among others. According to studies by the United Nations and several prominent global environmental organizations, almost half of the world’s population lives in the watersheds of the rivers whose sources lie on the Tibetan Plateau.

However, recent studies – including several by the Chinese Academy of Sciences – have documented a host of serious environmental challenges to the quantity and quality of Tibet’s freshwater reserves, most of them caused by industrial activities. Deforestation has led to large-scale erosion and siltation. Mining, manufacturing, and other human activities are producing record levels of air and water pollution in Tibet. Together, these factors portend future water scarcity that could add to the region’s volatility.

According to a May 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the region’s warming climate is causing glaciers to recede at a rate faster than anywhere else in the world, and in some regions of Tibet by three feet (0.9 meters) per year. The quickening melting and evaporation is raising serious concerns in scientific and diplomatic communities, in and outside China, about Tibet’s historic capacity to store more freshwater than anyplace on earth, except the North and South Poles. Tibet’s water resources, they say, have become an increasingly crucial strategic political and cultural element that the Chinese are intent on managing and controlling.

Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, in an interview with Circle of Blue, a US-based think tank, has recently said: “At least 500 million people in Asia and 250 million people in China are at risk from declining glacial flows on the Tibetan Plateau, This is one of the great concerns – a staggering number of people will be affected in the near future. There aren’t too many researchers who have looked at this water situation and its far-reaching impacts.”

Thus, China entails the potential of creating widespread water shortages among its neighbors. The IPCC’s report has already that the glaciers in the world’s highest mountain range could vanish within three decades: “Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the earth keeps getting warmer at the current rate.”
Similar warning signals have come from Peter Gleick, co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California and one of the world’s foremost authorities on water: “While the political issues swirling around Tibet and China are complex, there is no denying that water plays a role in China’s interest in the region. The water of Tibet may prove to be one of its most important resources in the long run – for China, and for much of southern Asia. Figuring out how to sustainably manage that water will be a key to reducing political conflicts and tensions in the region.”

China’s water development plans, as well as global climate change, should cause concern across Asia, because it would “seriously decrease [the] water supplies of India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Burma, as well as the Yangtze River Basin as far as Shanghai, especially in drought years.

Elizabeth Economy, the director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, has said in a recent interview that it’s not surprising that China is circumspect about the strategic consequences of the Tibetan Plateau’s freshwater supplies. According to Economy, control of water resources in the Tibetan Plateau might be an issue internally, but externally, it is not: “China wants to minimize the range of issues it needs to negotiate. Once this issue of water resources comes up, and it seems inevitable at this point that it will, it also raises emerging conflicts with India and Southeast Asia. They also receive their water from the Tibetan Plateau.”
According to Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.: “Water is seen as a strategic asset for China wherever it occurs in China. Because so much of the water for China and the region originates in Tibet, it adds an additional level of importance and political sensitivity and context that does not get the attention it deserves.” Summing up the volatile situation, Dabelko adds, “Nearly two billion people are dependent on water originating on the Tibetan Plateau. By definition, that makes it high politics and critically important in a politically strategic sense.”

Implications for India

China’s hydro-engineering projects and plans in Tibet have serious implications for India.
Through its control over the Tibet, China controls the flow of several major river systems that are a lifeline to southern and south-eastern Asia. However, China is toying with massive inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects. Beijing has embarked on an ambitious project, Great South-North Water Transfer Project, which is an engineering attempt to take water through man-made canals to its semi-arid north.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive industries and a rising middle class are drawing attention to their serious struggle for more water. Although India’s usable arable land is larger than China’s — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of all the major Indian rivers except one is the Tibetan plateau. Though the River Ganges originates on the Indian side of the Himalayas, yet its two main tributaries flow in from Tibet, the world’s largest plateau. Tibet’s status is unique wherefrom almost all the major rivers of Asia originate.
According to media reports, China is contemplating to build the world’s biggest hydropower plant on Brahmputra River’s Great Bend. China’s upstream projects have already been instrumental in causing flash floods in the Indian side of Arunachal Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh. India has repeatedly conveyed its serious concerns in this regard to the Chinese authorities who seemingly have made half-hearted attempts to assuage India’s apprehensions. Besides, China’s claim over Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh is another cause of irritant, apart from the diversion of waters of Brahmputra River.

Suggestions

In this regard, following suggestions are offered:
1. These issues entail the potential of causing tension in the Sino-Indian relations. According to one expert, the way to forestall or manage water disputes in Asia is to build cooperative river basin arrangements involving all riparian neighbours. Such institutional arrangements ought to centre on transparency, information sharing, pollution control and a pledge not to redirect the natural flow of trans-boundary rivers or undertake projects that would diminish cross-border flows.
2. Since the water resources originating from the Tibet region affect about seven countries including India, there is need to launch water diplomacy in close cooperation of these countries – Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos – with a view to impress upon China the need for not ignoring the genuine water requirements of these countries.
3. According to Prof. Braham Chellaney of the Centre for Policy Research (New Delhi), the first requirement for India is to “discuss and define what the no-go areas are, and arrive at basic rules,” something the two countries have not done. Officials of the two countries have so far had three meetings through a working group mechanism that has been set up, but it does not have the mandate to come up with such a robust agreement. “As long as there are no institutional arrangements,” he observes, “India’s position depends on China basically coming to an agreement by doing us a favour. And that is not a position India should be in.”