Let's craft a calibrated response to China's Yarlung dam project

This hydro project isn't a major threat but it's alarming enough for New Delhi to engage Beijing

- NITIN PAI

China is moving ahead with its plan to build a hydroelectric project on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet. India should be concerned. But appropriately. Worries that Beijing will use water as a tool of coercion or weapon of war are likely overblown. What ought to concern us more are the environmental consequences in the short term, disaster risks over the longer term and what it tells us about how a more powerful China will conduct itself in the present and future.

This month, China's top leaders announced the formation of the Yajiang Group, a new state enterprise charged with the construction of this project in Medog county, just north of the boundary with India's Arunachal Pradesh, at an estimated cost of $167 billion.

Comprising five dams, the Yajiang-Yaxia project will divert some of the water flow from the gorge where the Yarlung river does a U-bend into a system of tunnels, to generate 60 gigawatts of power, supplying electricity to 300 million people and creating 100,000 jobs for Han migrants in the Tibetan region. According to official Chinese reports, the project is "an important measure to implement the overall national security concept, the new energy security strategy and the Party's strategy of governing Xizang (sic) in the new era." While Beijing has advertised the project as intended to sell electricity to external markets, it is revealing that national security finds place as the first of its stated objectives.