Brahma Chellaney
The Economic Times
February 14, 2013
The Chinese government’s recent decision to build an array of new dams on rivers flowing to other countries is set to roil inter-riparian relations in Asia and make it more difficult to establish rules-based water cooperation and sharing. The longterm implications for India are particularly stark because several major rivers flow south from Tibet. Just the Brahmaputra’s annual crossborder runoff volume, according to UN data, is greater than the combined flow of three rivers that run from Tibet into south-east Asia: the Mekong, Salween and Irrawaddy.
China’s dam programme is following a well-established pattern on international rivers: build modest-size dams on a river’s difficult uppermost reaches, then construct larger dams in the upper-middle sections as the river picks up greater water and momentum, before embarking on mega-dams in the border area facing another country. China already has a dozen dams in the Brahmaputra basin and one each on the Indus and the Sutlej. It is close to completing one dam and has just cleared work on three others on the Brahmaputra. Two more are planned in this cascade before the dam-building moves to the water-rich border segment as the river makes a U-turn to enter India.
Asia, not Africa, is the world’s driest continent. China, which already boasts more large dams than the rest of the world combined, has emerged as the key impediment to building institutionalised collaboration on shared water resources. In contrast to the bilateral water treaties between many of its neighbours, China rejects water-sharing arrangement or joint, rules-based management of common resources.
India has water-sharing treaties with both the countries located downstream to it: the Indus pact with Pakistan guarantees the world’s largest cross-border flows of any treaty regime, while the Ganges accord has set a new principle in international water law by assuring Bangladesh an equal share of downriver flows in the dry season. China, by contrast, does not have a single water-sharing treaty with any neighbour.
Yet, most of Asia’s international rivers originate in territories that China annexed after the 1949 communist takeover there. Tibet, for example, is the world’s largest freshwater repository and the source of Asia’s greatest rivers, including those that are the lifeblood of mainland China and south and south-east Asia. Other Chinese-held homelands of ethnic minorities contain the headwaters of rivers such as the Irtysh, Illy and Amur, which flow to Russia and central Asia.
Most of the 54 new dam projects announced recently by China’s state council, or cabinet, are concentrated in the seismically-active southwest, covering parts of the Tibetan plateau. The restart of dam-building on the Salween after an eight year moratorium is in keeping with a pattern seen on other river systems: Beijing temporarily suspends a controversial plan after major protests flare so as to buy time, before resurrecting the same plan. In fact, according to a 2008 report in Time, work on laying the foundation of four Salween dams continued during the moratorium by reclassifying them as transportation projects.
Whereas the newly-unveiled projects on the Salween and the Mekong are mega-dams with big reservoirs, China claims its dam-building on the Brahmaputra involves only runof-river plants — a type that generates hydropower without reservoir storage by using a river’s natural flow and elevation drop. However, unlike India vis-a-vis Pakistan or Bangladesh, Beijing is neither willing to share with New Delhi the technical designs nor permit on-site scrutiny. The relatively large projects at Dagu, Jiexu and Zangmu indeed raise the spectre of storage. Such is the lack of Chinese transparency that the flash-floods that ravaged Himachal Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh between 2000 and 2005 were linked to unannounced releases from Chinese dams.
Asia awaits a future made hotter and drier by climate and environmental change and resource depletion. The continent’s water challenges have been exacerbated by consumption growth, unsustainable irrigation practices, rapid industrialisation, pollution, environmental degradation and geopolitical shifts.
If Asia is to prevent water wars, it must build institutionalised cooperation in trans-boundary basins that co-opts all riparian neighbours. If a dominant riparian state refuses to join, such institutional arrangements — as in the Mekong basin — will be ineffective. The arrangements must be centred on transparency, unhindered information flow, equitable sharing, dispute settlement, pollution control and a commitment to refrain from any project that could materially diminish trans-boundary flows. International dispute-settlement mechanisms, as in the Indus treaty, help stem the risk that water wrangles could escalate to open conflict.
China — with its hold over Asia’s transnational water resources and boasting over half of the world’s 50,000 large dams — has made the control and manipulation of river flows a pivot of its power and economic progress. Unless it is willing to play a leadership role to develop a rules-based system, the economic and security risks arising from the Asian water competition can scarcely be mitigated.
The author is a strategic affairs analyst.
