China mulls construction of massive dam on the Upper Brahmaputra

There's more good news in the offing for India's friendly, progressive central government in Delhi with Chinese officials openly canvassing for the construction of what could potentially become the world's biggest hydro-electric project at the Great Bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra river. The report emerges even as an Indian minister recently condemned his own government in the course of an official trip to Beijing for being unnecessarily paranoid about Chinese intentions.

The Great Bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra

Last year the government took its own sweet time to confirm Chinese construction of a dam on the Brahmaputra and then dismissed it as a matter of no consequence. (See: India downplays Chinese activity on the Brahmaputra)

In its upper reaches the Upper Brahmaputra is referred to by its Tibetan name, the Yarlung Tsangpo, even as it becomes the Brahmaputra in India and the Jomuna further downstream in Bangladesh.

Chinese engineers are once again canvassing for the construction of a dam of monster size which could generate an output of 38,000MW. The plan entails building a dam that would generate double the output of the biggest dam in the world - the Three Gorges Dam on the mid-reaches of the Yangtse. The Three Gorges Dam yields an output of around 18,000MW.

Though the plan to build the monster dam on the Brahmaputra is of 1996 vintage it is once again in circulation.

A report by UK's Guardian newspaper quotes Zhang Boting, the deputy general secretary of the China Society for Hydropower Engineering, as saying that a massive dam on the great bend of the Yarlung Tsangpo would ultimately benefit the world, despite the likely concerns of downstream nations, India and Bangladesh.