On a cold February morning, the residents of Parong village in Arunachal Pradesh climbed up a hillslope and gathered in the village’s large community hall. An air of caution filled the room – the Additional District Commissioner from the nearby Pangin village would be holding a meeting on an issue considered to be of national importance, with the potential to sink their homes: building an 11,200-megawatt hydropower project.
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When ADC Gamtum Padu finally arrived, he had an unexpected message. “I want to tell all of you, on behalf of the administration, that we’re sorry,” he said. After months of antagonising the residents for opposing the dam, the administration now came with folded hands. “We want to listen to you,” he said. It was the first time the government initiated a formal dialogue with families affected by the Siang Upper Multipurpose Project (SUMP), a hydroelectric and storage dam to be built on the Siang river – the part of the Brahmaputra river that passes through Arunachal Pradesh.
Since February, government officials have held two more meetings with affected parties, hoping to slowly build consensus in order to make the dam a reality. The proposed project would submerge more than 25 villages, including Yingkiyong, the headquarters of the Upper Siang district. The proposal to build the dam has been met with months’ long protests from local residents, who say displacement is unacceptable.
Residents of Parong village ahead of a meeting with the district administration. Image by Hagen Desa.
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“It was good that the government decided to speak with us. This is what we have wanted from the start,” said Tarok Siram, a gao bura, a village leader and a government functionary in charge of managing law and order issues in Parong.
The project gained prominence when China announced its plans to build a 60,000 megawatt dam on its side of the Brahmaputra, before it enters India. Along with the news of this development came concerns about the weaponisation of water, and the necessity to prepare a plan of defence.
Caught between rhetoric and conjecture, national security and the energy transition, are the communities living in the Siang valley who stand to be displaced. “How does displacing us serve the national interest?,” asked Gegong Jijong, president of the Siang Indigenous Farmers Forum (SIFF) – a group representing affected families. “If this dam is a matter of national interest, why doesn’t the government form a treaty with China? We are not anti dam, but we are being asked to give up our traditional lands, our livelihoods. If we leave our land, where will we go?”
Dam for a dam
On December 25, 2024, Xinhua, the official state news agency of China said the Chinese government had approved plans to build a 60,000 megawatt dam in Medog county, which, when built, will replace the Three Gorges Dam as the world’s largest to date.
The Three Gorges Dam, also located in China and with a capacity to generate 20,000 MW of energy, led to the displacement of 1.4 million people, according to news reports. Built across the Yangtze river, the dam’s length, at over 2000 metres, is equivalent to that of a low altitude mountain. Its height towers at 607 feet (182 metres). Since it was built, the Three Gorges Dam has been linked with increased landslide occurrence in the region, and even reported to have altered the Earth’s rotation by a few microseconds.
The Medog dam is likely to be built just after the Brahmaputra – called the Yarlung Tsangpo in China – takes a sharp bend and turns south, crossing the world’s deepest gorges before flowing into India. The Chinese government calls it a “green project aimed at promoting low-carbon development.” A statement in Xinhua said the dam would be of “great importance to advancing the country’s strategy for carbon peaking and carbon neutrality” and to cope with climate change. China has been under global pressure to transition away from coal – its biggest source of power – to cleaner fuel sources.
Homes along a slope in Parong village, one of the 27 villages that are likely to be submerged by the Siang Upper Multipurpose Project (SUMP), an 11,200-megawatt hydroelectric and storage dam to be built on the Siang river. Image by Hagen Desa.
The sheer scale of the project, however, has raised doubts about the Chinese government’s ability to carry out construction without causing serious environmental damage and worsening disaster risks. “Regardless of what kind of dam it is, it is certain to have an impact downstream,” Y. Nithiyanandam, Professor and Head of the Geospatial Research Program at Takshashila Institution, told Mongabay India. “It’s an ecologically sensitive area that’s prone to both flash floods and earthquakes.”
The idea is to leverage the water’s energy after it makes a steep descent through the gorge. A 60,000 MW dam in a seismically active zone, however, is an engineering feat never attempted before. The Chinese government claims the Medog project will be a run-of-the-river dam with no drastic impacts to water flow. “China will continue to maintain communication with countries at the lower reaches through existing channels, and step up cooperation on disaster prevention and relief for the benefit of the people by the river,” China’s foreign secretary said in a statement.
In the absence of any clear information about the Medog dam’s design, concerns about its impact downstream to India and Bangladesh have emerged, with a variety of outcomes on the table – from the river drying up considerably to the possibility of a strategic deluge unleashed by China. India’s Ministry of External Affairs shared its apprehensions with the Chinese government on December 30, 2024.
The uncertainty of how the Chinese dam could impact India has propped the idea of the Siang mega dam up, which Indian officials say will moderate upstream floods and drought by acting as a storage system. What could undermine these efforts, however, is a rapidly changing climate and an active seismic zone, say experts.
Stalled pre-feasibility report
The proposal to set up a mega dam on the Siang river first came up in 2017, when the Niti Aayog – the Indian government’s premier think tank – suggested doing away with two smaller dams that were planned on the river, in favour of a large dam in the valley’s upper reaches. Doing so would reduce project costs by 25% and attract an investment of Rs. 80,000 crores, a press statement from the chief minister’s office at the time, said.
The proposal drew opposition from residents almost immediately, but the idea of setting up the mega dam has persisted. In December 2022, the NHPC, the public sector company constructing the dam, prepared a draft Pre-Feasibility Report (PFR) based on three prospective sites for the megadam – one in Dita Dime, another in Ugeng, and a third in Parong.
“Parong is the most preferable because it would lead to the least submergence area-wise compared to the other two locations, and it’s technically suitable because only one powerhouse will have to be built, saving costs,” said an official with the NHPC, on the condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to speak with the media on record. “Building it in Parong would also save the Advanced Landing Ground built in Tuting, which serves as defence infrastructure for the government.”
The site of the proposed Siang dam is in one of India’s most biodiverse regions. A recent expedition into the Siang valley discovered more than 1500 different species of birds, plants, animals and insects, many of them new to science.
If built in Parong, the dam would have a storage capacity of 9.2 billion cubic meters – reportedly almost double the capacity of the Medog dam – with a wall that’s 250 meters high. It would be India’s highest capacity dam in terms of electricity generation. While the exact area subject to submergence isn’t known, 27 villages in the Siang and Upper Siang districts are likely to be completely submerged, with 43 villages affected in total, according to SIFF. Most living in the submergence zone, running into tens of thousands of hectares, are farmers who cultivate crops like orange, black cardamom, and rice on ancestral forest land.
Residents of Parong have not allowed the NHPC to conduct exploratory drilling surveys in the area – the last step of the PFR – and have consistently protested the NHPC’s presence in the villages. “We know that if the PFR happens here, the project will come through,” said Dubit Siram, a resident of Parong and a member of SIFF. “If the PFR shows a favourable result, the government will do whatever it needs to make the project a reality. This is why we won’t allow the PFR.”
This concern isn’t entirely unfounded – in recent times, projects dubbed to be of national importance have sailed through clearance processes despite poor quality impact assessments or opposition from local communities. The central government recently introduced exemptions for “strategic” linear projects, such as roads and railways, that fall within 100 kilometres from international borders, saying they do not need to apply for forest clearance.
The Siang river is the part of the Brahmaputra that flows through Arunachal Pradesh. The proposal to set up a mega dam on the Siang river first came up in 2017. Image by Hagen Desa.
Building consensus
Until recently, protests against the Siang dam were met with high handedness from the state government. In July 2024, two anti-dam activists – Ebo Mili and Dungge Apang – were detained by the police when the then Union Power Minister M.L. Khattar visited the state. The two planned to submit a memorandum to Khattar demanding a moratorium on large dam projects in the state.
Later, in December 2024, Siang’s District Collector, P.N. Thungon, sent a letter to Parong’s residents threatening to deploy central armed forces in order to complete the PFR exercise. When protests continued, with residents marching to the district headquarter, the district administration suspended the protesting gao buros of seven affected villages. Other measures, such as ordering the return of arms used for hunting – a ritual that holds much significance for the Adi community – also angered residents, who viewed such orders as an overreach. “The order to return hunting arms was given only to the protesting villages. We are treated as criminals, and the government’s response to our peaceful protests is one of mistrust,” said Elung Tapak, a resident and orange farmer.
In the face of the residents’ resolution, the administration is now taking another approach – engaging in dialogue. The state government has presented the SIFF with a memorandum promising that “all preparatory works for the SUMP would be carried out in consultation with project affected families.”
In the February meeting, which Mongabay India attended, officials from the district administration, NHPC, and state police took turns explaining the project’s benefits and promised to hear the concerns of affected residents. The suspended gao buros were given back their jobs. “There’s no guarantee that the project will come through after the PFR. If it does, you will have the opportunity to voice your concerns during the public consultation phase of the environment clearance process,” said Superintendent of Police J. K. Lego.
More unusually, the government is also routing certain developmental activities through the NHPC. This includes setting up roads and upgrading hospitals and schools in the district. “We got a mandate from the Prime Minister’s Office to do public outreach and welfare work, and we were given Rs. 300 crores from the Ministry of Jal Shakti to carry it out. It is not Corporate Social Responsibility,” the NHPC official said. “If people see development here, we hope they will accept the dam.”
Residents view the NHPC’s activity with suspicion, and as a covert way of building consensus in favour of the dam. Earning the trust of those impacted by the project won’t be easy. “This meeting is taking place far too late. We made a number of submissions to the administration, and in return we were talked down to, handed show cause notices, and threatened with CRPF deployment,” said Okiang Gao, president of the Parong Youth Association, during the meeting in February. “The system failed us. Don’t we have a right to defend what’s ours?”
Agricultural fields in Parong village. Image by Hagen Desa.
Discerning the impacts of dam building
Speculation that the Chinese will weaponise water is rife. “They will use their dam as a water bomb against us,” P.N. Thungon, Siang’s District Collector, told Mongabay India, adding, “The Chinese dam will divert 70% of the Brahmaputra’s water away. The Siang Multipurpose Project will protect the people by collecting the remaining 30% of water and supplying it downstream. The Siang dam is being proposed for the safety and security of the people.”
Thungon’s notions of a “water bomb” were commonly echoed by officials in the district administration, state government, the NHPC, and even affected residents. For residents who stand to be displaced, the imminence of the Chinese dam puts them between a rock and a hard place.
Simplistic narratives of the river’s water flow dynamics – and China’s purported manipulation of the river – are more harmful than helpful in the context of disaster mitigation, experts told Mongabay India. “We don’t actually find evidence of such a thing happening, where suddenly water is released without prior information, leading to a flash flood situation downstream,” said Sayanangshu Modak, a doctoral researcher at The University of Arizona’s School of Geography, Development, and Environment. Modak co-authored a paper with natural resource economist of the Observer Research Foundation, Nilanjan Ghosh, comparing popular rhetoric around Chinese “water hegemony” with available data.
The research found that hyperbolic statements about China’s influence over the Brahmaputra overshadowed instances of cooperation between India and China in times of disaster. The Brahmaputra has long been a source of political tension and competition between India and China, scholars note. The race to build dams in the upper reaches of the river could be an attempt to assert territorial control and rights over the water. Satellite imagery from the Takshashila Geospatial Lab shows that settlements and military camps have already been built in the areas surrounding the Great Bend, signalling intent to go ahead with the Medog dam.
Most people living in the submergence zone are farmers who cultivate crops like orange, black cardamom, and rice on ancestral forest land. Image by Hagen Desa.
More worryingly, without hard data, the rhetoric could be distorting probable impacts downstream. Modak and Ghosh find that while impacts of the Medog dam on sediment and water flow in Arunachal Pradesh cannot be ruled out, most of the sediment in the Brahmaputra is generated well within India’s borders, where precipitation is 12 times higher than in the rain shadow region of Tibet where the river originates. Sediment plays the vital role of distributing riparian soils and replenishing downstream riverine islands.
Similarly, the paper observes that the total annual outflow of the Yarlung river from China is about 31 billion cubic metres, whereas the annual flow of the Brahmaputra at Bahadurabad (a gauging station much further downstream in Bangladesh) is approximately 606 BCM. The paper argues that India’s own disaster mitigation efforts should be driven by data, and not rhetoric. “India’s concern should be to track hydro-meteorological events in the 320 km stretch between Nuxia, the final hydrological station from where India receives flood-period data, and Tuting, the first hydrological station within Indian territory. Unfortunately, there is no available data for this rain-rich segment of the river journey,” the paper says.
An existing Memorandum of Understanding mandates data sharing from three hydrological stations in China with India, capturing rainfall and water discharge. But this agreement doesn’t cover the crucial stretch of the river that passes through the Great Bend, before it enters India, and where the climate is most volatile. Sharing hydrological data gains even more significance in light of how disaster prone this region is, Nithiyanandam said. The Yarlung Tsangpo basin has five different climatic zones, making it especially ecologically fragile.
“Over the last decade, the Yarlung Tsangpo has seen some 600 flash floods and over 100 earthquakes. The river is fed by glacier melt and rainfall, both of which are seeing changing patterns due to climate change and could worsen impacts downstream,” he said, adding, “What we are witnessing here is a dam which can hold any impact, triggered naturally or artificially, from a higher slope. If the Medog dam comes up, India’s preparations should be geared towards reducing the quantum and velocity of water as it flows downstream.”
According to Modak and Ghosh, the more imminent threat is not of China “turning off the tap” to the Brahmaputra, but that of dam failure. The recent memory of a flash flood in Sikkim, which destroyed its biggest dam, is still fresh in the Siang valley. The question of who benefits from building large dams in the Himalayas looms over both projects.
“We’re not anti-national. We don’t want to see our ancestral lands drowned,” said Tarok Siram, the gao buro. “If this dam needs to be built in the name of national security, let it be done somewhere else. For now, we’re open to peaceful dialogue with the government.”
This article originally appeared on Mongabay. Read the original article here.