UPA under pressure to act fast on China

NEW DELHI, October 20 (Agencies): The Congress-led UPA government has come under enormous pressure to act on reports about China’s plans to build a dam on the river Brahmaputra in Tibet. With Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi expressing serious concern over the development, the issue likely to become a political hot potato for the Congress state government unless the Centre is seen to be making efforts to stop the construction of the dam.
Gogoi, who is in the Capital to meet the Prime Minister, held a press conference last week to broadcast his government’s worry about the construction of the dam up stream on the Brahmaputra, called the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet. He had said such a project by China would affect Assam and dry up the life sustaining river and its tributaries downstream. “Our apprehension is that if a dam is constructed on the main stream of the Brahmaputra, it will make the Brahmaputra to dry up and affect our water resources. I took up the matter with the Union foreign affairs minister and water resources minister too,” Gogoi had said.
The leader is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and foreign minister SM Krishna on the issue. Meetings on the issue are expected over the next two three days. A delegation from Arunachal Pradesh, led by the outgoing CM Dorjee Kandu, met the PM on the issue on Monday. The group is also expected to meet Congress president Sonia Gandhi. The Central government has maintained that it is studying whether China was indeed building a dam on the Brahmaputra as part of its 540 MW Zangmu hydroelectric project. However, the Assam government’s political exigencies are a lot more urgent.
“We don’t want to depend solely on the Centre. We will prepare a contingency plan on our own so that we know what measures need to be taken to face any situation. We may engage IIT for the exercise,” Gogoi said on Friday. He said the state government would set up a committee of experts to examine the fallout of the Brahmaputra being diverted. Gogoi’s statement came a day after it was reported that China was undertaking work on the dam. The contention has been verified by further reports that the government has undertaken a large-scale project to relocate people to facilitate the country’s north-south water diversion project.
Reports from China said plans were ready for resettlement work involving 3,30,000 people in China’s Hubei and Henan provinces. China plans to use the water diversion project, which will stretch across the country, to feed the parched areas of Beijing, Tianjin, Henan and Hebei regions. The resettlement work is expected to be complete by 2011. Reports also suggested that this would be China’s second largest resettlement plan after the Three Gorges dam.
The spokesperson of the Union external affairs ministry Vishnu Prakash had said that India would seek to know from the Chinese government whether there were recent developments that suggested a change from the position conveyed to India earlier. The Chinese side has denied plans to construct dams on the Brahmaputra earlier, dismissing it as reports in the media.

‘No Chinese dam over Brahmaputra’

Guwahati, October 20 (Agencies): China has formally clarified to India that it is not building a dam over the Brahmaputra river on its side, Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu said on Tuesday.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met a group of legislators and MPs from the northeastern state led by Dorjee Khandu in New Delhi on Monday. "The Prime Minister assured us that there was no dam being constructed over the Brahmaputra by China. In fact, Beijing had formally communicated this to the Indian government," Khandu said over telephone from New Delhi. The controversy follows media reports that Beijing was constructing a $167 million hydropower plant in Zangmu, 140 km southeast of Tibet's capital Lhasa, besides diverting water to its parched northwest and northeast territories, which includes the Gobi desert.
The 2,906-km long Brahmaputra is one of Asia's largest rivers that traverses its first stretch of 1,625 km in Tibet, the next 918 km in India and the remaining 363 km through Bangladesh before converging into the Bay of Bengal. "We are happy with the prime minister's assurance," the chief minister said.