China and India's dam war in the Himalayas

India is building a giant hydropower dam near the Siang river to counter a huge Chinese dam further north.

But this latest move in a tit-for-tat saga of water geopolitics between the two nations is seen as a threat by the millions of people who live and work in the surrounding areas, or further downstream in Bangladesh.

'Dam for a dam'

India's $13.2 billion (£10.6 billion) Siang Upper Multipurpose Project will "create a reservoir that can hold nine billion cubic metres of water and generate 11,000 megawatts of electricity", said Al Jazeera.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

And news of these construction plans comes a mere month after Beijing approved the building of its "most ambitious – and the world's largest –dam over the Yarlung Zangbo river, in Tibet's Medog county", just before it enters Indian territory (where it's known as the Siang river).

India says its dam will serve as a "buffer" in case of "excess and sudden water releases from dams in China", said The Diplomat, but Beijing has "downplayed" Delhi's concerns, insisting that detailed studies were carried out to make sure the new Chinese dam would "not have any negative effects on downstream countries".

For all this "dam for a dam" water war, relations between the two nations along their disputed Himalayan border are not currently at boiling point. In recent years, there have been skirmishes between Indian and Chinese troops in the area but 2024 "witnessed a thaw", with both sides "withdrawing troops from two flashpoints", said VOA News.

The troop withdrawals have set ties between New Delhi and Beijing "in the direction of some improvement", according to Subrahmanyan Jaishankar, India's foreign minister, but mutual mistrust "remains a key hurdle" to more friendly relations, said the US news site.

'Dangerous power tussle'

Either way, there's plenty of concern about India's plans in India itself. Locals in the Siang Upper Multipurpose Project area "have warned that at least 20 villages will be submerged" and two dozen more will be partly flooded, uprooting thousands of residents, said Al Jazeera

And, as a result of "this dangerous power tussle" over water resources, the "presence of two giant dams" in a region of the Himalayas that's prone to earthquakes "poses serious threats to millions of people" in India and Bangladesh.

Amid "intensifying resistance" from locals, the state government has sent in paramilitary forces – though there have not been any clashes yet.

The effects of climate change could "make these tensions" much more "dangerous and potentially destabilising in the upcoming decade", Michael Kugelman, South Asia Institute director at the Wilson Center, a US think tank, told Al Jazeera.

What's needed is a "comprehensive water-sharing agreement between China and India", said Rouhin Deb in The Indian Express, with the current "unilateral assurances" replaced by a "binding" formal framework.