Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi on Wednesday said China’s decision to operationalise a hydropower station on the Brahmaputra river is going to cause irreparable damage to Assam and other parts of the Brahmaputra basin, and blamed the central government for not taking up the matter with the northern neighbour.
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“All six of the station’s units were incorporated into the power grid on Tuesday”, state media reported. Yarlung Zangbo River in Tibet Brahmaputra is known. While China, India fears that the conflict could leave the water from these dams in India would be at serious risk of flooding. China has repeatedly assured us that they have no intention of diverting the waters of the river and that any projects that are coming up, including this one, are run of the river projects. It is the largest project of its kind in which 2.5 billion kilowatt-hours a year would generate.
“It will alleviate the electricity shortage in central Tibet and empower the development of the electricity-strapped region. It is also an important energy base in central Tibet”, the company said.
The Zam project was partly operationalised last November, when the first generating unit of the 9.6 billion Yuan ($1.5 billion) Zangmu hydropower station – positioned more than 3,300 meters above sea level on the “roof of the world” – started to work. Xinhua reported that the officials in the summer would be a vast power transmission so that a portion will be in the neighborhood Chinghai province.
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An Indian Inter-Ministerial Expert Group (IMEG) on the Brahmaputra in 2013 called for further monitoring of Chinese dams considering their impact on the flow of waters to the lower reaches. “India needs to be very vigilant about Chinese interventions on (the Tsangpo/Brahmaputra)”, former water resources secretary Ramaswamy R Iyer had told TOI in 2014, adding, “Run-of-the-river projects are slowly being recognized as a seriously harmful set of interventions”. IMEG had noted three dams, Jiexu, Zangmu and Jiacha, were within 25km of each other and just 550km from the Indian border. River water agreements 2008 and 2010, during the June to October, provides statistics said.
