China-India border dispute spills over into water resources: ‘difficult to agree’

Aksai Chin is mostly controlled by China, but India claims it as part of its Kashmir region. In the past, China has said all of Arunachal Pradesh belongs to it.

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India’s hydropower projects had been allotted to private companies to be built “about 15 years ago but remained non-starters due to various reasons”, a government readout said on August 12.

It’s believed the projects didn’t take off initially because of financing issues, but Delhi has now decided to finally build them.

In March, his administration approved the construction of what it called the country’s “largest hydroelectric power facility” on the Dibang River – a tributary of the Brahmaputra in Arunachal Pradesh – at a cost of nearly US$4 billion.

India is also planning a US$14.5 billion hydropower project in the state’s small town of Yingkiong, about 200km (124 miles) from the country’s border with China. The aim is to generate a whopping 10 gigawatts in a project described by Indian media reports as being “central to counter China’s ambitious water diversion”.

For comparison, it would take more than 300 wind turbines to generate 1GW of electricity.

Analysts say India’s massive hydropower push not only aligns with the nation’s development aspirations but is also a way to reinforce territorial claims and safeguard itself from potential “psychological warfare” – a term used in a US research paper 10 years ago – that China could employ from upstream in times of conflict.

China’s relentless dam construction along the Yarlung Tsangpo has been causing unease for years.

In its 12th Five Year Plan, covering 2011-2015, China planned to develop “three more” hydropower projects “on the main stream” of Tibet’s Brahmaputra river, according to India’s Ministry of External Affairs, responding to a parliamentary question in March last year.

Eleven Chinese dams were already built or being planned on the Brahmaputra, a 2023 paper by the Lowy Institute think tank said.

In November 2020, Beijing announced a massive hydroelectric project capable of generating 70GW an hour, dwarfing the Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest with a capacity of 22.GW.

Although details of the new project’s location are shrouded in secrecy, indications point towards the “Great Bend”, a pivotal area a few kilometres upstream from the Indian border, where the river’s course turns sharply towards Arunachal Pradesh.

“Dams have been built on Yarlung Zangbo [in Tibet] over the last two decades,” said Medha Bisht, an associate professor in the department of international relations at Delhi’s South Asian University.

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The concern is that China is now focused on lower stretches of the river, which “might have ecological and strategic costs. Ecological in terms of degradation of land, sedimentation dynamics and flash floods, strategic in terms of using dams to divert water eastward”, Bisht added.

Making these concerns graver in India is the lack of a water-sharing treaty with China.

Opangmeren Jamir, a research analyst at Delhi’s Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, said the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh, through which the river flows, “is disputed and claimed by China as its own. Hence, it becomes very difficult for India and China to enter into an agreement on water sharing in this region”.

Instead, both countries rely on a memorandum of understanding established in 2002. It obliges China to provide hydrological information about the river during flood seasons. However, the pact, renewed every five years, expired in June.

The Indian Ministry of Water Resources says on its website that the agreement is yet to be renewed. This Week in Asia reached out to the secretary of the department, Pankaj Kumar, for an update, but he did not respond.

The lack of a formal treaty leaves a precarious void, with experts saying that informal agreements are insufficient during times of diplomatic strain.

“When both countries have good relations, they will enter into agreements, they will talk to each other diplomatically, engage on issues and share data, but when they don’t have good relations, it becomes a problem,” said Amit Ranjan, a research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies.

The risks associated with relying solely on a memorandum of understanding are highlighted by historical precedent.

In 2017, China ceased sharing water-flow data on the Yarlung Zangbo’s flood levels during a period of heightened tension, when both countries had a 72-day military border stand-off at the Doklam trijunction between China, India and Bhutan.

While China maintained that the data was not shared due to technical reasons, Delhi saw the situation as a sign of how water could be weaponised in future conflicts.

A 2013 paper by the US Naval War College’s Centre for Irregular Warfare and Armed Groups also noted that China’s status as an upstream power gave it “the ability to choke off the food supply to its largest neighbour India”, referring to the Brahmaputra river’s role in sustaining agriculture.

The paper said China’s ability to “induce water and food shortages” in India and Bangladesh by creating dams was an existential threat.

An Indian parliamentary panel last year also expressed worries over China’s dam building, saying it could lead to water being stored and released for running its own turbines.

This, the panel said, could lead to variations in downstream flow which could affect the Brahmaputra river “and thus affect India’s endeavours to tap the region’s water resources”.

Ranjan agreed that water-sharing could be weaponised, if bilateral ties were to nosedive.

“Ideally, water-sharing talks and diplomacy should be kept separate. But that does not really happen,” he said. Bilateral tensions could even derail the rudimentary data-sharing that does exist between the two countries, he said.

“When there is suspicion around the bilateral relationship, there are also doubts over how credible the data shared is,” he said.

Yet Delhi’s gambit to embark on its construction spree in Arunachal Pradesh, a renowned “ecological hotspot”, could also exact costs.

Even as the Indian government announced the revival of the 12 dams, two activists were arrested in Arunachal Pradesh’s capital, the town of Itanagar, for protesting against the water projects.

There have previously been vigorous local protests against the dams, focusing on the potential displacement of residents and environmental destruction.

“Arunachal Pradesh is a biodiversity hotspot,” Jamir said. “It is critical that both India and China remember that fact when they are planning [these types of] projects in the region.”