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On a football field ringed by misty mountains, the air rang with fiery speeches as tribesmen protested a planned mega-dam, India’s latest move in its contest with China over Himalayan water.
India says the proposed new structure could counteract rival China’s building of a likely record-breaking dam upstream in Tibet by stockpiling water and guarding against releases of weaponised torrents. But for those at one of the possible sites for what would be India’s largest dam, the project feels like a death sentence.
“We will fight till the end of time,” said Tapir Jamoh, a resident of the thatch-hut village of Riew, raising a bow loaded with a poison-tipped arrow in a gesture of defiance against authorities. “We will not let a dam be built.”
Jamoh’s homelands of the Adi people are in the far-flung northeastern corner of India, divided from Tibet and Myanmar by soaring snowy peaks. Proposed blueprints show India considering the site in Arunachal Pradesh for a massive storage reservoir, equal to four million Olympic-size swimming pools, behind a 280-metre (918-foot) high dam.
The project comes as China presses ahead with the $167 billion Yaxia project upstream of Riew on the river known in India as the Siang, and in Tibet as the Yarlung Tsangpo.
China’s plan includes five hydropower stations, that could produce three times more electricity than its vast Three Gorges dam — the world’s largest power station —though other details remain scant.
Beijing — which lays claim to Arunachal Pradesh, rejected by India — says it will have no “negative impact” downstream.
“China has never had, and will never have, any intention to use cross-border hydropower projects on rivers to harm the interests of downstream countries or coerce them,” Beijing’s foreign ministry said.
Chinese reports hint at a tunnel-diversion project, while India eyes Riew for its mega-dam. Locals like 69-year-old Jamoh say damming the Siang would erase their culture and identity.
Despite a thaw between New Delhi and Beijing, the two most populous nations have multiple areas of disputed border manned by tens of thousands of troops, and India has made no secret of its concerns.
The river is a tributary of the mighty Brahmaputra, and Indian officials fear China could use its dam as a control tap — to create deadly droughts or release a “water bomb” downstream.
China rejects that, saying that the “hype surrounding the Yaxia Hydropower Project as a ‘water bomb’ is groundless and malicious”.
But Arunachal Pradesh state Chief Minister Pema Khandu said protective action against China’s dam is a “national security necessity”, and sees India’s dam as a safety valve to control the water.
“China’s aggressive water resource development policy leaves little room for downstream riparian nations to ignore it,” said Maharaj K. Pandit, a Himalayan ecology specialist at the National University of Singapore.
India’s dam could generate up to 11,600 MW, becoming its most powerful and cutting reliance on coal.
