BLOG
January 20th, 2008
Lost in the generally enthusiastic media coverage of the recent Indo-Chinese bilateral meetings is the long-standing issue of water resource management between the two emerging giants. Given its presence in Tibet, China controls India’s river water and flooding. Even without any fully completed projects in place to tap into this source, many Indians feel this situation is too dangerous for their national security, must not be tolerated, and may have to be corrected by India gaining control over the land where the source lakes and glaciers reside, namely Tibet. Whether this issue will ever lead to full-out regional war is not for speculation in this post, but the recent Indo-Chinese economic meetings give us a timely reason to detail a controversial Chinese plan which involves damming the Brahmaputra river and diverting 200 billion cubic metres of water annually to feed the aging Yellow river. As noted in a recent article, many people feel that — if the project goes through — it could strangle one of India’s and Bangladesh’s biggest sources of water.
“…Though it is still at the discussion stage and presents an enormous engineering challenge, … the proposed project — called the ‘Greater Western Water Diversion Project’ — is part of the gigantic South-North water project that has already been started by China and plans to take the diverted water to feed north-eastern China, watering Shaanxi, Hebei, Beijing and Tianjin areas, which could be looking at a parched future.
The western route of the south-north water transfer project is designed to divert water from tributaries of the Yangtze, including the Dadu, Yalong and Jinsha rivers, to the upper reaches of the Yellow River. Work on the eastern and middle routes of the diversion project was formally launched in 2002, and construction on the western route is scheduled to get under way in 2010. The volume of water diverted along the western route is projected to amount to 17 billion cubic meters a year.
It is the proposed western route — budgeted at about 304 billion yuan — that is worrying strategists and policy-planners in the Indian government…..They believe this project, if allowed unopposed, could have immense impact on lower riparian states like India and Bangladesh.”
And, as noted in a second article, some Chinese experts share their concerns, including Professor Liu Shiqing, secretary-general of the West Development Research Centre, Sichuan Academy of Social Sciences in Chengdu:
“…We are really concerned about the western route of the south-north water transfer project. We wonder whether the proposed scheme could do little or nothing to save the Yellow River, and end up destroying the Yangtze instead.”
The article goes on to report:
“…Lin Ling, an economist and former director of the Sichuan Academy of Social Sciences, observed: “We are well aware that building the western route is much more difficult and riskier than building the Three Gorges project. The latter was debated by the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and finally voted on by the National People’s Congress. But the planners in charge of the western route simply declared that it had been given the green light, claiming that the announcement by the central government of the formal launch of the eastern and middle routes meant the western route could go ahead too.”
…Professor Lin told [the article’s author] that he raised a number of questions, including:
- What impact would construction of the project have on the environment of the Tibetan plateau?
- Could the project have negative impacts on the climate in China, and even in Asia as a whole?
- Is it possible to pump 17 billion cubic meters of water from the Tibetan plateau at a time when the glaciers are shrinking?
- Is it right to use the diverted water to discharge sediment building up in the Yellow River?
All these questions – while difficult to answer – are legitimate. We can only hope that China will take time to work with India to evaluate such before the western route is put into place.