By JIANLI YANG, Dec 15, 2025
In mid-2025, India launched a US$77 billion hydropower initiative to construct more than 200 dams in its northeast, especially in Arunachal Pradesh — territory China claims as southern Tibet. With a planned capacity of 75 gigawatts (GW), it mirrors China’s 2025 Yarlung Tsangpo Lower Reaches Hydropower Project, signalling an escalating geopolitical rivalry where hydropower, territorial control and data sovereignty converge.
India aims to transmit more than 76 GW of hydropower from the Brahmaputra basin by 2047 through a vast new network that includes 208 dams and 11 GW of pumped storage. Its centrepiece, the Upper Siang Multipurpose Project — a 280–300 metre, 11 GW dam on the Siang River — would be India’s largest. Framed as green energy, its deeper purpose is to counter China’s upstream control in Tibet and reinforce India’s water and energy security.
Meanwhile, China’s mega-dam at the Great Bend in southeastern Tibet is projected to be the world’s largest hydropower installation at 67–80 GW — roughly triple the Three Gorges Dam — at a cost exceeding US$160 billion. Beijing presents it as part of its ‘green transition’, but New Delhi views it as strategic leverage.
Past incidents — such as China’s withholding of hydrological data before the 2000 Yigong Zangbo outburst flood — fuel distrust. Without a water-sharing treaty, India fears Beijing could weaponise water, using ‘hydro-leverage’ to induce drought or floods downstream. Chinese proposals to divert Tsangpo waters towards Xinjiang heighten these concerns. Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu has called India’s hydropower push a ‘national security necessity’ and a safety valve if China weaponises its upstream dams.
Hydropower on the Brahmaputra–Yarlung Tsangpo has become an arena where climate rhetoric masks a deeper battle over strategic autonomy, energy security and AI infrastructure.
China is integrating its projects into the State Grid’s AI-driven ‘smart energy brain’. India is tying hydropower to digital sovereignty through AI-enabled dam monitoring, sediment modelling and partnerships under the National Mission on Transformative Mobility and Battery Storage… [Continue Reading]
Source: https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/12/15/india-and-china-in-deep-water-over-himalayan-hydropower/