India quakes over China's water plan

[GliderGuider]

India quakes over China's water plan

BANGALORE - Even as India and China are yet to resolve their decades-old territorial dispute, another conflict is looming. China's diversion of the waters of a river originating in Tibet to its water-scarce areas could leave India's northeast parched. This is expected to trigger new tensions in the already difficult relations between the two Asian giants.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is reported during his recent Beijing visit to have raised the issue of international rivers flowing out of Tibet. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has said that water scarcity threatened the very "survival of the Chinese nation".

The river in question is the Brahmaputra, which begins in southwestern Tibet where it is known as the Yalong TsangpoRiver. It flows eastwards through southern Tibet for a distance of about 1,600 kilometers and at its easternmost point makes a spectacular U-turn, known as the Shuomatan Point, or the “Great Bend”. This is just before the river enters India, where it is joined by two other major rivers; from this point of confluence it is known as the Brahmaputra. It then snakes into Bangladesh, where it is joined by the Ganges River to create the world's largest delta before emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

It is at the Great Bend that China plans to divert water, in addition to its hydroelectric power project that is expected to generate 40,000 megawatts of power. The diversion of the waters is part of a larger hydro-engineering project, the South-North water diversion scheme, which involves three man-made rivers carrying water from the icy Tibetan plateau to the arid north.

Analysts have drawn attention to incidents in the past to show how vulnerable downstream areas are to what takes place upstream in Tibet. In June 2000, for instance, the breach of a dam in Tibet led to floods and left over 100 people dead or missing in Arunachal Pradesh. In August that year, swollen lakes in Tibet caused severe flooding of the River Sutlej in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, sweeping away around 100 bridges and killing scores of people. If floods upstream have a serious impact on downstream areas, the diversion of waters will have “even more devastating consequences”, an India-China watcher in India, Claude Arpi, warned.

India and China look like they may be building up to a major resource war. With nukes...

[Doctor Cynic]

1. Look elsewhere for a bigger problem.

Just look at Russia: huge amounts of pristine water that is currently unused by human activity, which millions of Chinese really can see from their house. Relations between the two are okay for now, but bad blood runs deep and there is still resentment in China over how all of Siberia was lost to this backwater Slavic tribe. What happens when China demands that a canal be built from Lake Baikal to Beijing?

Tensions between the two nuclear armed giants are inevitable, and perhaps in 50 years Sarah Palin can see China from her house.

[Nihil]

4. Whilst that might be another issue for the long term ...

... there is no way that China will go into a totally unjustifiable
resource war that they may not even win when they can easily (and
more-or-less legally) take water out of a river in their own country
(well, a country that the bastards invaded and occupied without any
serious complaint from the rest of the world).

India will suffer before Russia does but I suspect that Russia will
align with India to try to forestall a nuclear crunch. (Pakistan are
just a well-armed rogue nation in this particular fight ... "just" ...)

[mahina]

5. Oceanlinx's desalination and energy generation works beautifully

and is much, much cheaper than war. It's an Aussie company. Water wars are preventable. http://www.oceanlinx.com/

[madrchsod]

2. the next "world war" will be in asia

china,india,pakistan, and russia...take your pick on the match -ups

[hogwyld]

6. There goes about half the world's population

right there. Once they're done wiping each other out, the resource crunch will be slightly mitigated.

[truedelphi]

3. And meanwhile the banks who benefit from our taxpayer funded BailOutMonies

Set their eyes on the local water utility companies.

Watch over the next few years as the banks take control of these utilities, and then, for the relatively cheap water rates to skyrocket in price.