CHENNAI: For more than 20 years now, the Three Gorges Dam in China’s Hubei Province has stood out as an engineering marvel. This massive hydropower project, built on Yangtze River, can hold 40 billion cubic metres of water, enough to fill several million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Its sheer size has sparked claims, not without scientific basis, of it slowing the speed of the earth’s spin. The Three Gorges Dam is easily the world’s largest. But it will end up being pushed to a distant second place as China this week approved the mother of all hydropower projects.
The new project, to be built on the Brahmaputra River, is expected to generate three times the power produced by the Three Gorges Dam. It will come up at the point in the Himalayan reaches in Tibet’s Medog County, where the river makes a sharp U-turn to flow into Arunachal Pradesh. The proposed site is not very far from the disputed border with India.
Beijing first announced plans to build the dam in 2020. China said it will generate more than 300 billion kWh of electricity each year, which, as per reports, is enough to meet the annual needs of more than 300 million people.
India’s concerns
India has closely watched Chinese constructions on the Brahmaputra. There are concerns that such activities may slow or reduce the flow of water to India. “We have urged them to ensure that the interest of downstream states isn’t harmed,” a Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson said in 2020.
Swiss
