The Controversial Upper Siang Hydropower Project

 The Northeast of India only catches media attention when there is unrest there. We already have the ongoing ethnic violence in Manipur and now another flashpoint has arisen in Arunachal Pradesh. The people residing near the River Siang, which later becomes the Brahmaputra, are protesting against a proposed dam on that river because it will displace close to 1.5 lakh people of the Adi tribe and submerge not only their farms, ecological niches and religious sites but also a few major towns along the river.

Even though the proposal to build a dam on the Siang has been there for many decades, it has gained urgency in recent times with the Union Government because China has started building the Medog dam in Tibet on the Yarlung Tsangpo as the Siang is known there. China is taking advantage of the world's deepest canyon in Medog on the river where over a distance of 50 kilometers there is a drop in elevation of over 2000 meters. So a series of cascading dams are being built along this stretch to divert water into steep drops which can be utilised to generate electricity to the tune of 60000 megawatts that will make it the world's largest hydropower project. The topography is such that it is not possible to build a big storage dam on this stretch which is known as the "Great Bend" and so a series of smaller run of the river dams will be built which will return the water to the river after going through the electricity generating turbines.
The Government is saying that to counter the possible effects of massive floods that may arise due to some earthquake related disaster in the Medog dam which is in a highly seismic zone, it is necessary to build a dam on the Siang in India with a large storage capacity of 9 billion cubic meters. For this to be possible the dam height has to be 300 metres or more. A dam of this great height with such a large storage capacity has to be built considerably downstream so that the upper limit of the reservoir is well within the India-China border at village Gelling. That is why the headquarters town of Upper Siang district, Yingkiong, will come under submergence along with 30 other villages and towns and this will completely destroy a large swathe of the homeland of the Adi tribe.
No wonder then that the Adi people are protesting vehemently against this dam. They are faulting the Government on its logic by saying that the total annual flow in the Siang when it enters India is around 30 billion cubic metres mainly from snow melt in Tibet. In fact three times more water flows in the Siang in Arunachal Pradesh after it enters India, mainly from monsoon rains and the floods occur due to this. Moreover, the dams in Medog are run of the river projects with minimal storage so even if they are destroyed by an earthquake there will not be much of a flood downstream. The Adi are saying that it would be better to undertake extensive soil, water and forest conservation work in the Siang basin to counter floods than build this dam.