The Cost of Hydropolitics: How Control of Water by India and China Impact Indigenous Lives

The Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet before it flows into India and becomes Siang and Brahmaputra. Source: Luca Galuzzi. 

 “If the dam is built, we will lose everything.” 

— Tarok Siram, head of a district called Parong in Arunachal Pradesh, India, in an interview with Down to Earth magazine, January 2025. 

The Brahmaputra originates as the Yarlung Tsangpo in the Tibetan plateau, arcs around the Himalayas at the Great Bend, and then enters India as ‘Ane’ (mother) Siang and Brahmaputra, and finally ends in Bangladesh as the Jamuna. Following Beijing’s approval of a mega hydropower project near the river’s Great Bend in late 2024 and New Delhi’s accelerated dam-building plans in Arunachal Pradesh, the river has become a strategic theatre for Indo-Chinese power and security rivalry.  

However, this state-centric framing obscures the more immediate realities of Indigenous communities along the river. For them, hydropolitics translates into uncertainty over land and livelihoods, heightened flood anxiety and climate volatility, and the erosion of cultural and spiritual life. The confrontation over the river is inextricably linked to questions of survival. 

While headlines focus on intergovernmental debates measured in megawatts and strategic leverage, these marginalised voices remain largely absent from the narrative. This article portrays the Brahmaputra not as a geopolitical prize, but as a lived landscape.  

The Siang as a Strategic Frontier 

The transboundary geography of the Siang, with high-altitude waters controlled by China and densely populated floodplains in India and Bangladesh, means that questions of river infrastructure are inherently geopolitical. In recent years, this ‘frontier’ logic has become evident through two parallel developments.  

First, China has moved from surveying the Great Bend’s hydropower potential to actively building there. In December 2024, Beijing approved a mega-dam on the lower Yarlung Tsangpo, projected to generate 300 billion kWh annually by harnessing the river’s steep Himalayan drop, a plan that was enacted in July 2025. 

Second, India has responded by accelerating its own hydropower ambitions in Arunachal Pradesh – a territory that China claims as “South Tibet”. Seeking downstream storage and control points, New Delhi aims to develop over 76 GW of hydropower capacity in the Brahmaputra basin by 2047, even as China builds above it. 

Crucially, this competing progress has developed alongside limited cooperation. Unlike with its other immediate neighbours, India doesn’t have a water-sharing treaty with China. Up until 2022, China shared seasonal hydrological data for flood forecasting with India, but that, too, fell short of a comprehensive river-basin framework. Reports by India’s water resources ministry underscore that China has not shared river data since 2022, and that the agreement wholly expired in 2023. As a result, planning around the Brahmaputra is increasingly dependent on national risk calculations.

Breaking Down the Pro-Dam Argument 

Proponents of hydropower projects on the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet and the Siang in India primarily believe that dams provide clean energy, mitigate floods, and strengthen national security. However, these appeals obscure significant risks. 

Hydropower is framed as a climate solution, with both India and China – the world’s most populous countries – positioning Himalayan dams as key to reducing fossil fuel dependency and meeting rising energy demand. Although hydropower is low-carbon, it is still high-risk: the eastern Himalayas are highly seismic, and large reservoirs increase the likelihood of landslides and sediment disruption.  

As for flood control, reservoirs are meant to regulate monsoon flows and reduce downstream inundation. In practice, however, weak coordination mechanisms between India and China mean that when extreme rainfall forces sudden water releases, dams can intensify flooding downstream. 

Strategically, India presents downstream dams as a hedge against upstream control. For China, large-scale construction reinforces administrative and territorial authority in Tibet. However, the claim that dams offer decisive control over river flows is widely contested, as much of the Brahmaputra’s water is generated by rainfall and tribunals within India itself.  

Taken together, all three pro-dam arguments consistently overlook the consent of the local communities. Decisions justified through rationales of climate policy or national security are made with minimal input from the Indigenous peoples who live along the river and bear the consequences of its exploitation. 

Lives and Livelihoods Along the Siang 

“Without any agreement between India and China on river water sharing, if these dams come up, it will only destroy fragile Himalayan ecology and communities living here.” 

— Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman, independent researcher, India, as quoted in Down to Earth magazine, January 2025.

Indigenous communities living along the Siang refer to it as Ane Siang, or Mother Siang. This reflects that the river is far more than a waterway; it is embedded in subsistence and cultural identity. Across the Siang valley, villages depend on the river for fishing, floodplain farming, livestock grazing, and ancestral spaces used for seasonal ceremonies. Climate variability and hydropower planning are transforming such rhythms, with little consultation of the communities most directly affected. 

Local tribal groups in India, such as Adi and Mishing, have repeatedly voiced concerns about the impacts of excessive infrastructure construction on the river on their landscapes and livelihoods. In the Upper Siang district alone, at least twenty-seven villages fall within the projected inundation zones of the proposed Siang Upper Multipurpose Project (SUMP). Large dam projects threaten to submerge ancestral land and alter river flows in ways that communities cannot adapt to, placing farmland, homesteads, and socio-culturally significant sites at risk. 

Effectively, submerged homesteads and fields would leave families without cultivable land, possibly forcing relocation. Even short of displacement, livelihoods sustained by the Siang’s seasonal rhythm – including fishing, floodplain agriculture, and livestock grazing – are highly sensitive to changes in water flow. Even modest disruptions can affect fish migration, soil fertility, and cropping cycles, increasing economic precarity for households with few alternatives.  

These pressures are compounded by flood risk: the Brahmaputra basin is one of South Asia’s most flood-prone regions, a vulnerability intensified by climate change. Hydrologists such as Costanza Rampini, writing in the Journal of Hydrology and Engineering, emphasise that when dams prioritise hydroelectric generation over environmental flows and flood control, they can worsen flood outcomes by disrupting riparian landscapes and amplifying downstream risk during extreme rainfall events. 

Opposition to the Indian government’s Siang Upper Multipurpose Project (SUMP) in villages across the Siang Valley has, thus, been absolute. Survey teams, accompanied by police deployments, arrived to conduct pre-feasibility work, creating what residents describe as a climate of pressure and coercion. This prompted widespread peaceful protests, with residents attempting to block survey activity. In December 2024, Bhanu Tatak, the legal advisor to the Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum (SIFF), told Down to Earth magazine that “the people of the Siang valley have been against dams on the river for over 4 decades,” adding that communities “have the right to protest against this decision in order to protect their homes and hearths.”  

Perhaps the most immoral grievance is procedural. Organisations like the SIFF and the Northeast Human Rights (NEHR) have repeatedly criticised the lack of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) and transparent discussions surrounding surveys and dam projects. Rather than mere media announcements before projects are initiated, these organisations call for genuine FPIC – a right guaranteed to Indigenous peoples under Article 32(2) of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). 

Taken together, the implications of displacement, economic precarity, flood exposure, and procedural exclusion indicate that the human costs of hydro-politics require careful consideration within dam-building strategies. 

Toward a People-First River Policy 

Sustainable approaches to the Brahmaputra must factor in not only security and power concerns, but also governance that prioritises risk reduction and human well-being. Policy research shows that data transparency, cross-border coordination, and community participation in shared river governance enable better flood-risk management than unilateral dam construction by individual states. 

In parallel, countries must embed FPIC into dam planning, in line with international standards for Indigenous rights. Without placing affected communities at the centre of decision-making, hydropolitics risks becoming yet another human cost foregone in the name of development.    

Written by Esha Toshniwal

Edited by Pallavi Pundir