By AFP | 2025-10-01

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 weaponized torrents.

Proposed blueprints show India considering a site in Arunachal Pradesh for a storage reservoir equal to four million Olympic-size swimming pools, behind a 280-meter-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, though other details remain scant.

Beijing, whose claim to Arunachal Pradesh India fiercely rejects, 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 told AFP.

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.

A Chinese 'water bomb'

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.

The "hype surrounding the Yaxia Hydropower Project as a 'water bomb' is groundless and malicious," Beijing asserts.

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 produce 11,200–11,600MW of hydropower, making it the country's most powerful by a huge margin, and helping scale back emissions from its coal-dependent electricity grid.

But generating power is not the priority, acknowledged a senior engineer from National Hydropower Corporation, the federal agency contracted to develop the dam.

"It is meant for water security and flood mitigation -- if China seeks to weaponize their dam and use it like a water bomb," the engineer said on the condition of anonymity.

During the lean season, the reservoir would be filled to capacity so it could add water if diverted upstream. In the rains, water would reach up only two-thirds of the dam wall, leaving capacity to absorb water if released suddenly by China.

India's former ambassador to Beijing, Ashok K. Kantha, called China's dam project "reckless" and said that India's dam, as well as generating power, would be a "defensive measure" against potential attempts "to regulate the flow of water."

India's dam would create a giant storage reservoir of 9.2 billion cubic meters, but the exact area flooded depends on the final location of the dam.

Destroying a world

The Adi people, whose lush lands dotted with orange and jackfruit trees depend on the Siang, fear the dam will drown their world.

"We are children of the Siang," said Tapir Jamoh, a 69-year-old resident of Riew. "Because it is from the Siang that we draw our identity and culture."

The dam, residents say, would drown dozens of villages. "If they build a huge dam, the Adi community will vanish from the map of the world," said Likeng Libang from Yingkiong, a town that even officials say is likely to be entirely underwater.

India's "dam-for-dam" approach may be counterproductive, said Anamika Barua, a trans-border water governance scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.

"Diplomatic engagement, transparent water-sharing agreements and investment in cooperative river basin management would yield more durable and equitable outcomes than reactive infrastructure building," she said.

Building mega-dams in earthquake-prone Arunachal Pradesh is also risky, she added.

But India's construction drive of massive dams suggests it will not back down on this project. Two other major dams overcame local resistance.