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25-01-2025
NEW DELHI/ BEIJING: Gegong Jijong lined up with hundreds of other protesters on a cold afternoon last month near the Siang River in India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, shouting antigovernment slogans.
“No dam over Ane Siang [Mother Siang],” the protesters in Parong village demanded.
The Siang River, cutting through serene hills, has been considered sacred for centuries by Jijong’s ancestors in the Adi tribal community farmers whose livelihood depended on its water but all of that is now at risk, he said, as India moves to build its largest dam over their land.
The $13.2bn Siang Upper Multipurpose Project will have a reservoir that can hold nine billion cubic metres of water and generate 11,000 megawatts of electricity upon completion more than any other Indian hydroelectric project. It was first proposed in 2017, and officials are now carrying out feasibility surveys.
Locals, however, warn that at least 20 villages will be submerged, and nearly two dozen more villages will partly drown, uprooting thousands of residents.
Amid intensifying resistance from locals, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led state government has ordered the deployment of paramilitary forces to quell protests, though there have not been any clashes yet.
The protesters insist that they are not going anywhere. “The government is taking over my home, our Ane Siang, and converting it into an industry. We cannot let that happen,” said Jijong, the president of the Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum (SIFF) community initiative. “Till the time I’m alive and breathing, we will not let the government construct this dam” but the BJP government argues that the protesters have got it wrong. Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu has insisted that it is “not just a hydro dam,” but that its “real objective is to save the Siang River”.
At the heart of the Indian dam project that Jijong and his community are opposing is a geostrategic contest for water and security between New Delhi and Beijing, who are locked in a tense rivalry that, in recent years, has also at times exploded into deadly border clashes.
The Siang River originates near Mount Kailash in Tibet, where it is known as the Yarlung Zangbo. It then enters Arunachal Pradesh and becomes much wider. Known as the Brahmaputra in most of India, it then flows into Bangladesh before sinking into the Bay of Bengal.
Last month, China approved the construction of its most ambitious and the world’s largest dam over the Yarlung Zangbo, in Tibet’s Medog County, right before it enters Indian Territory.
Soon after China first officially announced its plan to construct the dam in 2020, officials in New Delhi started seriously considering a counter-dam to “mitigate the adverse impact of the Chinese dam projects”. The Indian government argues that the Siang dam’s large reservoir would offset the disruption in the flow of the river by the upcoming Medog dam, and safeguard against flash floods or water scarcity but the presence of two giant dams in a Himalayan region with a fragile ecosystem and a history of devastating floods and earthquakes poses serious threats to millions of people who live there and further downstream, caution experts and climate activists. And India and China’s dangerous power tussle over Himalayan water resources could disproportionately hurt Indigenous communities.
‘Major flashpoint’
The new mega-dam in Medog County over the Yarlung Zangbo will dwarf even the Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest hydro dam, in central China.
