The Tibetan plateau is the principal watershed in Asia and the source of 10 major rivers, including the Brahmaputra (or Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet), the Sutlej and the Indus. About 90% of the rivers flow into the lower riparian states of India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
The idea to divert the waters from the South to the North is not new in a China that dreams big projects and executes them like the Three Gorges Dam and the Tibet Railways. According to the reports, the project has three segments, but one of them which bothers India most involves a dam on the Brahmaputra at its Great Bend (a sharp u-turn) near the Indian border, which forms the longest canyon in the world.
The dam would entail construction of a hydroelectric project at the Bend to generate a projected 40,000 MW of electricity (which is about the same amount of power India plans with its nuclear deal) and a subsequent diversion of waters northwards. This would be disastrous for India and Bangladesh.
What sharpened attention to this initially (though reports of the project had been around) was a news report in Chinese newspapers around the time former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee was in China in 2003, which said China was going to start a feasibility study for a hydropower project in the Yarlung Tsangpo in the Tibet Autonomous Region. That was picked up by Indian observers and India%u2019s concerns have only increased since then.
