Will China's dam in Tibet devastate eastern India?

Probably for decades, the people living in eastern India have been talking about the hydroelectric dams in upper riparian Tibet (under occupation of China since 1951), which has the potential to devastate the entire region following a man-made error or natural disasters, precisely a high-intensity earthquake.

- NAVA THAKURIA

Probably for decades, the people living in eastern India have been talking about the hydroelectric dams in upper riparian Tibet (under occupation of China since 1951), which has the potential to devastate the entire region following a man-made error or natural disasters, precisely a high-intensity earthquake. For the millions of Brahmaputra River basin dwellers, the dams in southeastern Tibet may pose as a 'water bomb' with the controlling authority of a visibly unfriendly Communist regime, with no pragmatic bilateral relation with the largest democracy on the globe. The recent earthquakes that hit the Tibetan plateau many times only precipitated the anxiety among the populace living on both banks of the mighty Brahmaputra, which originates in Mansarovar Lake in the Himalayan region and culminates in the Bay of Bengal.

The Communist administration in Beijing lately approved the construction of a gigantic hydropower project in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo (Tsangpo) River in eastern Tibet, which is hardly 22 kilometers from the Indian bordering state of Arunachal Pradesh, to add to the list of multiple hydropower stations along the river that flows from west to east till it enters India. Projected to be the world's largest river dam with a budgetary allocation of USD 137 billion, the colossal venture is estimated to produce 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. Beijing thus campaigns for clean energy production to achieve China's carbon neutrality goals with a large number of hydro-projects, ignoring various environment-related implications in downstream localities of India and Bangladesh.