Tuesday, February 18th, 2025

Father of dams on Brahmaputra! After all, why were questions raised in India on the timing of China’s dam plan?


New Delhi: China’s proposed Medog Dam project on the Yalung Tsangpo River (Brahmaputra in India) would be a very large hydropower project, surpassing even the Three Gorges Dam. This ambitious project is fraught with concerns, especially for India, because of the shared route of the river and potential ecological and geopolitical implications. This dam will be more than three times larger than the three valleys. China will try to exploit geographical advantage through this.Medog Dam
➤ Estimated annual electricity production 300 billion kilowatts annually
➤ Three Gorges Dam in Central China, which is currently the largest dam in the world.
➤ It has been designed to produce 88.2 billion kilowatts of electricity.
➤ Medog Dam will cost $137 billion, which is much more than the $34.8 billion spent on Yangtse.
➤ There will be a waterfall from a height of 2,000 meters under the Yalung Tsangpo project from a distance of 50 km in the Great Bend area of ​​the river. Due to this, water will flow very fast in Arunachal Pradesh of India, which opens the way for production of hydroelectric power in large quantities.
➤ The Medog Dam will be a run-of-the-river dam and Beijing has said that its flow or reservoir will not be diverted to store its water. he/she wants to use it only for hydropower generation.
➤ Beijing has planned to build several dams on the Yalung Tsangpo to generate hydropower, although only one of them has been completed. Reports say that 30% of China’s hydropower potential is concentrated in Tibet.

it’s a matter of timing

➤ The Medog Plan was introduced as part of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), but it garnered particular attention as Beijing and New Delhi announced to pursue construction work in the wake of the 2020 Galwan clash along the LAC in Ladakh. This came months after the decision was taken to resolve the dispute arising out of.
➤ The announcement of materializing the plan may cause many concerns for India.
➤ About 70% of Brahmaputra gets deposited after entering India. This is due to heavy rainfall in this part of the Himalayas while the Tibetan Plateau falls in the rain shadow region.

Narayan Setu on Brahmaputra

➤ The Diplomat magazine quoted an expert as saying that the hydropower project impounds water to drive its turbines, causing daily changes in its volume and affecting marine life downstream and people living on its banks. Is.
➤ Uttam Sinha, senior fellow at defense think tank IDSA, told our associate newspaper The Times of India (TOI) that the Tibetan Plateau’s ‘rugged terrain… poses a difficult challenge to the construction of a super dam’. While Beijing may not be stopped by ecological concerns, he/she said it could use the project as a bargaining chip in border talks with India.

Ecosystem Challenges

➤ The 6.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Tibel on January 7 has highlighted the dangers of building large infrastructure projects in the region, although Beijing has said the event did not affect any of its dams or reservoirs.
➤ Tibet An ecologically fragile Shigatse, Tibet is located along the tectonic plate boundary in the Himalayan region, which is a major earthquake prone location. Fan Jiao, a geologist based in China’s Sichuan province, told the South China Morning Post that the proposed site for the Medog Dam is ‘a major center of biodiversity’ and a geologically unstable area. Geologist Jiao said the ‘potential’ for geological disasters in the Yalung Tsangpo Valley is much higher than for rivers in western China, where ‘many examples of negative impacts due to hydropower development have been observed’.

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