The Great River Theft

SOUTH CHINA
MORNING POST
AGENDA
James Johnston
Jul 15, 2007

A plan to redirect water from the Himalayas is dire news for the mainland's neighbours, writes James Johnston


Visitors to Arunachal Pradesh - India's most northeastern state - cannot fail to be struck by the beauty of this largely unspoiled rural region which has borders with Bhutan, China's Tibet region and Myanmar. Through this countryside runs the mighty Brahmaputra, a life giver and provider for tribal fishermen and farmers who rely on the river's bounty and water.

Unfortunately, for the residents of Arunachal Pradesh the 21st century is intruding on their rural paradise.

For energy-hungry India, the potential hydropower of the river is too great to ignore. For the water-scarce regions of northern China, the river may help solve the problem of water scarcity plaguing its north and west. The river is called the Yarlung Tsangpo before it crosses from Tibet into India as the Dihang and then the Brahmaputra.

In fast-growing India, with a population of 1.1 billion, energy is badly needed. The interests of the million or so people in Arunachal Pradesh, most of whom live in close proximity to a river, are very much secondary.

However, an even greater threat to the livelihoods of the people of Arunachal Pradesh, not to mention those downstream in Bangladesh where the Brahmaputra becomes the Jamuna, is posed by Beijing's plans to exploit the upper reaches of the great river.

For the mainland, a rapidly expanding super-economy hungry for resources, finding adequate supplies of water is a matter of national urgency.

Whether it is to meet the energy needs of the largest population on Earth at 1.3 billion - the mainland has built more dams than any other country - or meeting the nation's food needs, where irrigation is used for over 70 per cent of food production, vast quantities of water are needed. But headlong development has come at the expense of water quality.

In China's arid north and west some 300 million people are short of water. And much of that available is heavily polluted.

At the highest levels the question is constantly being asked: where will the water come from?

"The central and local governments have all realised that water shortages have become a key constraint to the country's economic and social development," says Zhu Guangyao, deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration.

"There's growing tension among rural interests, urban interests and factories over who gets water in China," says Yukon Huang, a Singapore-based adviser to the World Bank. "Water will become a major problem for China in the next decade."

Beijing is looking to deal with the problem by means of a bumper solution.

One stage of the solution was completed in May last year, when the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze - 12 years in the making - had its final layer of concrete put in place. The dam, which has resulted in the displacement of around 1.4 million people, will be fully operational in 2009.

The completion of this monumental project is only one part of a much wider water strategy - the South-North Water Diversion Project. By 2050 engineers hope to move an estimated 45 billion cubic metres of water annually from south to north through an elaborate series of tunnels, aqueducts and canals.

Already half a million people have been relocated as engineers seek to link the country's major arteries: the Yellow River, Yangtze, Huaihe and Haihe. The scheme requires construction of three diversions in the eastern, central and western parts of the country at a cost roughly twice that of the Three Gorges Dam - somewhere in the region of US$62 billion.

It is not only mainlanders who will be affected by this wholesale realignment of the country's water arteries.

The geography of South Asia is such that every manipulation of a river by the mainland impacts on those downstream.

Tibet is known as the "Roof of the World" for good reason. It is the catchment area for 10 of the world's greatest rivers that flow through deep canyons into Asia like giant gutters after heavy rain, supplying almost half of the world's population.

Tampering with these vital waterways in an age of growing climate change awareness seems ludicrous, yet that is exactly what Beijing is proposing. Picture the Himalayan glaciers as a massive natural water tank. The mainland authorities wish to punch a great hole in that tank and siphon water away from its neighbours through a buried pipe no one seems to have noticed.

Work is well under way on two of the diversions: the central and eastern routes. The western route is an altogether more difficult proposition as it involves diverting water from the mightiest of Tibetan rivers, the Yarlung Tsangpo.

Since the late 1990s the mainland has been interested in exploiting the Yarlung Tsangpo. However, the river is not important to the mainland alone. For India's states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam and Bangladesh, it is a vital water source. Its journey takes it through the Zangpo canyon, which contains the Tsangpo gorge: eight times steeper and three times larger than the Colorado in the Grand Canyon. At a sacred site the Tibetans call Pemako - the last hidden Shangri-La - the river makes a dramatic U-turn from east to west, flowing into India at The Great Bend. In just 200km the river descends 3,000 metres - the greatest hydropower potential in the world.

Following preliminary studies in 2003, the mainland's proposed plan - as outlined by the chief planner of the Academy of Engineering Physics, Professor Chen Chuanyu - would involve using nuclear explosives to blast a 15km tunnel through the Himalayas to build a dam capable of generating twice the power of the Three Gorges Dam. The hydropower potential would be sufficient to pump the river water 800km into the desert regions of northwest China, eventually linking with the Yellow River. This would fulfil the final third branch of the mainland's South-North Water Diversion Project.

The sheer effrontery of diverting a river of such importance to the mainland's neighbours has perhaps ensured the rest of the world remains sceptical that it will proceed.

"Man should intervene with nature and reorganise her for his purposes," Professor Chen has said. "With this project the drought in northwest China could be terminated and the flood catastrophes in Southeast Asia brought under control."

Some experts are not so confident. "The south-to-north project will alleviate shortages in China's northern plain, but it won't come close to solving them," says Eva Sternfeld, a Beijing-based director at the Environment and Sustainable Development Reference and Research Centre. "Water demand in northern China is just too huge."

Professor Chen plays down the effects of the project on southern neighbours, suggesting cheap electricity could be sold to India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

His words are unlikely to assuage the fears of those downstream. With the mainland's potential ability to turn the "taps" on or off, flood control takes on a far more sinister dimension. Control over Tibet's largest river is as great a political tool as any military force - like laying siege to an enemy fortress from the safety of your own home.

"China's green light for the [Yarlung Tsangpo] project could be considered by South Asia as a declaration of war," says Claude Apri, an Indian-based writer and journalist.

There is already a tense border dispute between the Tibet region and India. The McMahon Line, marking the border between Arunachal Pradesh and Tibet, has never formally been recognised by the mainland and military incursions are frequent. Last year, Sun Yuxi, the mainland's ambassador to India, declared: "In our position the whole of what you call the state of Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory ... we are claiming all of that."

The Indian response has so far been meek, perhaps daunted by the realisation that the mainland can quickly mobilise a force in the Himalayas by train and road access through a region India has barely explored on foot. "China seems intent on aggressively pursuing projects and employing water as a weapon," says Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

Beijing maintains that it would seek approval for any water diversion project. That remains to be seen.

In 2003 India denounced the plan to divert the northern source of the Brahmaputra, but it seems to have changed tack. New Delhi has now extended the velvet glove by backing plans to dam a section.

This payoff has been likened by one Tibetan publication to the Indian fable regarding a rural simpleton who chopped off a tree branch he was sitting on. It is unlikely that any of the rural locales in Tibet, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam or further downstream would support something so suicidal.

In any case, India has its own plans for exploiting the Brahmaputra and the communities along the river will pay the price.

They will be forcibly displaced from a river with which they have lived in harmony for as long as anyone can remember. Millions downstream in India and in Bangladesh are reliant on the river to provide vital soil sustenance and irrigation. They, too, will suffer.

And if India is not prepared to stand up to the mainland, then Bangladesh is up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

Maminul Haque Sarker of Bangladesh's Centre for Environmental and Geographic Information Services says the water flow of the Brahmaputra-Jamuna will decline by one-third if the project goes ahead.

"Around 15 to 20 small and medium-sized rivers including Dhaleshwari, Shitalakkha and Balu will die," he says, with devastating consequences for the country's agriculture and fishing industries.

Additional reporting by Bloomberg

(c) South China Morning Post