NEW DELHI: A report from India’s National Remote Sensing Agency, indicating increased construction activity on the Brahmaputra river (called Yarlungzangbo by the

Chinese and Yarlong Tsangpo by the Tibetans) has got India worried, prompting Cabinet Secretary KM Chandrasekhar to convene a top level meeting of secretaries to see how best the problem can be managed.

China has consistently denied it is building any dams or diverting river waters in the Tibet plateau, but satellite and remote sensing data indicate a large number of power generation projects on the upper reaches of the Sutlej, the Indus and the Brahmaputra. India does not have any river waters sharing agreement with China, the upper riparian state, but in 2007 initiated an expert committee level dialogue on the issue with China, with the aim of arriving at a workable agreement on the usage of the waters.

The expert committee, with the water resources ministry as the nodal agency, has met thrice since it

was set up, but other

than getting crucial hydrological data (relating to water flows) from China (for a fee), has not made much progress, government sources said on Wednesday.

According to Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, the issue of power projects on the Tibetan rivers has been taken up with China, but China claims these are “run of the river projects”, which generate electricity without diversion of the waters or building storage facilities.

When Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Thailand last month on the margins of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit, the issue of diverting river waters was taken up. According to the government sources, Premier Wen said a satisfactory arrangement would be worked out on the issue between the two countries.

China’s water resources in the Tibetan plateau, where most of the major South Asian river systems arise, will be a crucial factor in determining the future course of South Asia’s economic development, particularly agricultural growth and food security. It could also become the source of major conflict between states in the region, scholars and analysts said today, speaking at a seminar on ‘South Asia 2020 : Towards Cooperation or Conflict’ organised by the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses. With climate change likely to adversely affect the livelihood of millions of people in the region, shrinking glaciers and the sharing of dwindling river waters will become as crucial to the bilateral Sino-Indian discourse as the boundary issue and security concerns. Pakistan, which complained bitterly about India constructing the Baglihar dam on the Chenab river, is now worried at reports of China constructing a dam on the Indus river.