CHINA'S SUPER DAM IN THE HIMALAYAN GORGE

OR more than 20 years now, the Three Gorges Dam in China's Hubei Province has stood out as an engineering marvel.

- ISSAC JAMES MANNYATH @Chennai

This massive hydropower project, built on Yangtze River, can hold 40 billion cubic metres of water, enough to fill several million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Its sheer size has sparked claims, not without scientific basis, of it slowing the speed of the earth's spin. The Three Gorges Dam is easily the world's largest. But it will end up being pushed to a distant second place as China this week approved the mother of all hydropower projects.

The new project, to be built on the Brahmaputra River, is expected to generate three times the power produced by the Three Gorges Dam. It will come up at the point in the Himalayan reaches in Tibet's Medog County, where the river makes a sharp U-turn to flow into Arunachal Pradesh. The proposed site is not very far from the disputed border with India.