The Brahmaputra Concern

The mighty Brahmaputra, which originates from the holy Mount Kailash (abode of Lord Shiva in Hindu mythology) near Mansarovar Lake and is fed by the Gyema Yangzom Glacier during warmer months, has a huge and mesmerising course in Tibet before it curves stunningly into Arunachal Pradesh to eventually enter Assam. In Tibet, it flows as Yarlung Tsangpo (the Chinese name for the river) some 2,000 km eastward before making a very sharp U-turn, called the Great Bend in Tibet's Nyangtri Prefecture, and enters Arunachal. During this amazing U-turn, not only is the Himalayan range split into two, but it also forms the world's steepest and longest canyon (a steep gorge), called the Brahmaputra Canyon – which China now wants to develop as a tourist hub. But we shall discuss this somewhere else. What is Nuture-engendered awe is that the canyon is 505-km long, 21-km wide, and its core part measures an average of 2,673 metre in depth! It is called the Yarlung Tsangpo Great Canyon in the official Chinese parlance. Here hangs a tale.

The Great Bend has an enormous hydropower potential, which China wants to exploit to the hilt to respond to the water cries of its people in its parched northern plains. About 600-800 cities in Northern China, including prominent ones like Shaanxi, Hebel, Beijing (the capital itself) and Tianjin, suffer from an acute water shortage. Water woes in the south are less. But since the north is industrially more advanced, China must ensure that the region grapples with its water woes successfully. So, what better way than to either build a huge (unparalleled in the world dam history) dam at the Great Bend or divert the river right there towards the north? An introduction was given to the dam project by this writer last week in this column ("Water War: Northeast in Peril", The Sentinel, 12 November 2017). Here we throw some light on the neighbouring country's audacious water diversion enterprise, called the Great Western Route by zealous proponents in that country, including the People's Liberation Army (PLA) generals.

It was in 1999 that the then Chinese President Jiang Zemin inaugurated a grand infrastructure development plan called xibu da kaifa, which means Great Western Opening Up or Great Western Extraction, to develop that country's hydropower infrastructure to meet both water and power needs in the western region. This programme was based entirely on the river water potential of Tibet, known as the fount of at least 10 rivers such as the Brahmaputra, the Yangtze (on which China has built the world's largest dam, the Three Gorges Dam, with the world's highest installed capacity of 22,500 MW), the Salween and the Mekong (these two latter rivers have already been exploited at China's hydroengineering best). The Great Western Route (to be called GWR henceforth) is the ambitious, and more often than not controversial, hydro-component of xibu da kaifa.

What essentially is GWR? As Brahma Chellaney, arguably India's top strategic expert, who has done extensive research on Asian water issues, says in his epoch-making book Water: Asia's New Battleground, GWR "is centred on the waters of the Brahmaputra, the Salween, the Mekong, and the three Yangtze tributaries located on the eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau – the Jinsha, the Yalong, and the Dadu. The Great Western Route is also known as Shoutian – a name that represents a fusion between the first four letters in Shoumatan (the Chinese name for the Suma Tan site on the Brahmaputra where the uppermost dam for the purpose of river-waters rerouting is to be built) and the port city of Tianjin, the end point of the Yellow River, to which waters from the other rivers are to be diverted (emphasis added). Interestingly, shuo tian translates as 'reverse flow' in Mandarin. So, the Great Western Route is indeed what it entails – a reverse-flow canal."

Clearly, given the fact that the Brahmaputra is the most important river that flows out of the Chinese territory (Tibet) to any other country because its "mean annual transboundary runoff volume is nearly equal to the aggregate volume of cross-border flows of all the other rivers directly flowing into India from Tibet", the "reverse-flow canal" must be a canal to divert the Brahmaputra at a strategic point to take its waters to Western China in the north in order to smartly respond to its water exigencies. This is a dangerous proposition, with very serious implications for the people of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam who are heavily dependent on the river, apart from the threat it would pose to the prized biodiversity of the two States. Add to all this the grand Chinese plan to build a dam at the Great Bend twice as large as the Three Gorges Dam at the reported cost of $ 1.2 billion to generate about 40,000 MW power! Since China's hydroengineers are one of the best in the world and the top political leadership of that country is manned by hydroengineers-turned-politicians, and given that books of the likes of Li Ling's celebrated and widely distributed Tibet's Waters Will Save China find great favour with the communist leadership, besides the PLA top brass, one should not be surprised if China has already finalized its plans. After all, impenetrable secrecy is the greatest hallmark of the opaque Chinese regime.

In fact, Li's grandiose plan has a marvellous physics element to it: his plan has ensured that no laws of physics are violated during the proposed diversion of the Brahmaputra. Here, again, we get a glimpse of how scientific-minded the Chinese are when it comes to hydro-ambitions. Since extremely tall mountains and the majestic Brahmaputra Canyon come as impediments to tapping the Great Bend water reserves, Li proposed an alternative: to shift the diversion point from the Great Bend upstream, towards west, to the 3,588 metre-high Shoumatan site near the famous eighth-century Tantric meditation cave of Tibetan Buddhist Guru Rinpoche. Therefore, as Chellaney has exposed in his book in question, "Li's plan seeks to reduce the need to pump water uphill, thereby ensuring that the construction of the 1,239-kilometre route (from the Brahmaputra in Tibet) to the Yellow River (in the majority Han heartland) does not openly defy the laws of physics." This is perhaps hydrophysics at its best. But the newly elected Narendra Modi government would do well to seek the valued opinion of such experts and press upon the Chinese leadership to share all data pertaining to the Brahmaputra so that lower riparian regions such as Northeast India are not imperilled.