rangan dutta
After the recent Chinese intrusion in Ladhak&’s Daulat Beg Oldi area, the focus is back once again on Arunachal Pradesh as the Chinese leadership has not deviated from its objective of diverting the Siang river, one of the main tributaries of the Brahmaputra, to North China before it enters India. China has, of course, denied that the water diversion project is being taken up soon. It has sent a signal to India about its long term geo-economic and strategic interest in Arunachal Pradesh, which it calls “Southern Tibet”.
Geo-economics is an emerging discipline. Though not as well established as geo-politics, its basic premise — that “geography is economic destiny”— seems to hold good for the entire Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin sub-region of South Asia encompassing eastern and North-east India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and parts of Myanmar up to the Bay of Bengal port of Sittwe in Rakhine province. The politicians, particularly in the eastern states, under the delusion of state-based, linguistic and political identities are yet to fully capture the implications of development in their neighbourhood for their economic and ecological future.
 Nothing else explains the lack of interest in the media in the recent assessment of international bodies placing Bangladesh, dubbed once as a “basket case”, among the 11 emerging Asian economies and the opportunities this remarkable development will create in the Bay of Bengal. However. mindsets are changing and this is evident from the recent agitations in Assam and Manipur against massive plans to build high dams to exploit the region&’s hydel potential, especially in Arunachal Pradesh, which alone is estimated to have the potential for 50,328 MW.
The Arunachal Pradesh government approved the construction of 132 hydel projects with a total installed capacity of 40,145 MW to 12 public and 120 private companies as of October 2010, involving the construction of over 100 high dams upstream in the state. This will entail massive deforestation, the submergence of valley lands, displacement of tribal farmers and a disruption of livelihoods.
Dam-induced floods from the 405 MW Ranganadi hydel project in Arunachal Pradesh and the Assam plains have already led to agitations against the 2000-MW Lower Subarnsiri and 1,750-MW Lohit hydel projects, now under construction along the Assam-Arunachal border, are instances of project-induced water conflicts that are certain to spread if the Centre or the states implement the projects in the pipeline. The Arunachal Pradesh government is naturally happy as these projects involve an investment of over Rs 100,000 crore in a time frame of five to 10 years in a state with a population of  one  million-plus.
The 2007 World Bank strategy report on development of the North-east estimated the revenues from the sale of free power at the rate of 12 per cent of power generated from the project, which is admissible to the state, would at least triple if all the hydel projects were sanctioned or implemented. Moreover, the current practice of the project proponents to make “up front payments” to the state as a kind of advance payment of royalty or future free power that the state is entitled to receive, is an attractive proposition for the states usually faced with resource crunch.
This is a clear windfall gain for the states as it would allow more space for revenue spending. But the question remains, could a North-eastern state really develop fast through sale of power to the rest of India? The answer is a clear “no” as the experience of the resource rich countries like Nigeria and Chad – rich in oil and even the recent spurt in mining of coal and limestone in the Garo Hills region of Meghalaya for export to Bangladesh, suggest that the sudden induction of money, unaccompanied by the creation of basic growth-inducing institutions, modern skills and entrepreneurship, quickly turn a resource-rich country into one afflicted with “resource curse” for several reasons.
First, the political class would prefer quick-maturing infrastructure projects that attract contractors from outside, in the process creating opportunities for sub-contracting for locals and outsourcing and a huge cash flow in a placid tribal and agrarian society that did not experience it earlier.
Second, it corrupts the police force as extortion from vehicles carrying materials, often illegally, is too lucrative to avoid and is the first step towards the building up of a police-criminal-armed outfits-politician nexus which leads to a deficit of democracy and, unless nipped in the bud, an exploitative security obsessed state eventually.
Third, it creates a fertile ground for semi-educated local youth to form armed outfits with some pet political catchwords to carry on extortion as a viable business proposition because the victims usually are not unwilling to cooperate. Its overall impact is huge project time and cost overrun, which again suits everybody but in the process the state and society get destabilised. And destabilisation spreads rapidly like the flood waters of the Brahmaputra in two ways.
First, because no one paid heed to the note of caution given in the above World Bank report that the eastern Himalayan rivers have minimum flow during winter (December-February) and maximum during the monsoon (June-September), there will be seasonal variations in hydel power output. The run of the river projects would face problems in absorbing large blocks of base water during the monsoon. Thus, when the peak demand is less in the monsoon the reservoirs have to release water. This, the Assamese farmers in upper Assam have rightly pointed out, has been causing devastating and sudden flashfloods in downstream plain areas in the command of the 405-MW Ranganadi project affecting even areas that were not prone to flooding and have been disrupting the livelihoods of millions and endangering costly infrastructure of roads and bridges built over the years and, ironically, with Central funds.
Loss of livelihoods spreads disaffection and this seems to be a weak link in the North-east regional plan for infrastructural development. The proposed giant hydel project at Tipaimukh in Manipur will entail the felling of eight million trees and irreversible destruction of life-supporting sub-tropical rainforest for which no amount of compensatory afforestation will ever restore even a fraction of its ecological value.
The environmental impact of these projects requires not just a state- or a project-specific assessment but a sub-regional effort because of its impact on neighbouring countries. It is time the Centre and the states took note of this spontaneous agitation of farmers and forest-dwellers across the North-east, the resistance to the looming resource curse and jointly promote growth of trans-boundary water governance in the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin in the true spirit of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical Economic Cooperation and the UN declaration of 2013 as the International Year of Water Cooperation.

The author, a former Assam cadre IAS officer and scientific consultant in the office of the PSA to the government of India, is presently a principal consultant, International Coop Alliance-Asia-Pacific, New Delhi