NEW DELHI: India mentioned on Friday (Jan 3) that it has expressed issues to China over the deliberate building of a mega hydroelectric dam upstream in Tibet, saying it would “monitor and take needed measures to guard our pursuits”.
If constructed, the dam would dwarf the record-breaking Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in central China, with probably extreme impacts for hundreds of thousands of individuals downstream in India and Bangladesh.
A report by China’s official Xinhua information company final month introduced the challenge on the river – often called Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet and Brahmaputra in India – linking it to Beijing’s carbon neutrality targets and financial targets within the Tibet area.
China “has been urged to make sure that the pursuits of states downstream of the Brahmaputra are usually not harmed by actions in upstream areas,” Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal mentioned on Friday.
Jaiswal informed reporters that New Delhi “will proceed to observe and take needed measures to guard our pursuits.”
India has established rights over river waters and has “persistently expressed… our views and issues… concerning mega tasks on rivers in its (Chinese) territory”, he added.
“These features have been reiterated along with the necessity for transparency and consultations with downstream nations following the most recent report.”
