March 28, 2025
DHAKA – Bangladesh has expressed concern over China’s plan to build a massive hydropower dam upstream on the Brahmaputra in Tibet and has formally requested detailed technical information from Beijing.
The Chinese government approved the construction of the Medog Hydropower Station in December 2024. The project will be built on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo river, which becomes the Brahmaputra in India and the Jamuna in Bangladesh. The construction work is expected to begin in 2029 and be completed by 2033.
Officials from Bangladesh’s Ministry of Water Resources said they sent a letter last month requesting four key documents from China — an environmental impact assessment, feasibility study, climate impact assessment, and disaster impact assessment.
However, Dhaka has yet to receive any response.
“We have sent a letter enquiring about those issues from China. But we are yet to get any reply,” said Syeda Rizwana Hasan, an adviser to the ministries of environment, forest and climate change, and water resources.
Rizwana said that during the foreign adviser’s recent visit to China, Chinese officials assured Bangladesh that the dam would be a run-of-the-river hydropower project and that no water diversion would take place. However, she noted that the issue may not receive official attention during Chief Adviser Prof Muhammad Yunus’ tour to China.
The Brahmaputra is a transboundary river originating from the Angsi Glacier near Mount Kailash in the Himalayas. It flows roughly 3,000km through China, India, and Bangladesh before emptying into the Bay of Bengal. The river also receives significant catchment contributions from Bhutan.
The $137 billion project aims to generate 60 gigawatts of electricity — nearly three times the capacity of China’s Three Gorges Dam (22.5 GW) — and would be powerful enough to meet the annual electricity needs of the United Kingdom.
Chinese state media has described the Medog Hydropower Station as a safe and ecologically sensitive project that will help meet China’s carbon neutrality targets. But environmentalists and regional experts have raised alarms over the possible downstream impacts.
“These days, management of common river systems anywhere in the world prioritises the participation of people in the basin and riparian states from the inception to the implementation stage of any infrastructure project that interferes with the natural flow,” said Sharif Jamil, environmentalist and Bangladesh country representative for Riverkeeper, an NGO.
“But unfortunately, the entire Ganges river system in Bangladesh has already been damaged due to long-standing unilateral interventions and water-diverting projects in India.”
Jamil warned that China’s project in such a geographically sensitive location could further compound the challenges facing downstream countries. “Now China with this giant project is in a very sensitive geographical location over the Brahmaputra river system!”
Malik Fida A Khan, executive director of the Centre for Environmental Geographic Information Services (CEGIS), voiced concerns about the ecological and hydrological impact of the dam.
“Seventy percent of the dry season flow of the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna [GBM] basin that passes through Bangladesh comes via the Brahmaputra,” he said. “Any intervention of this magnitude could seriously reduce dry season flows.”
He added that over 50 percent of the sediment Bangladesh receives comes through the Brahmaputra, playing a crucial role in land formation in the delta region. Disruption to sediment flow could also increase riverbank erosion as the river system adjusts to changes in water-sediment balance.
“We’ll be able to assess the full scope of the impact when we will get the technical reports we’ve requested from China,” he said.
Jamil emphasised the need for legal and institutional cooperation among all riparian countries.
“Bangladesh should have ratified the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention long ago as the lowest riparian nation,” he said. “It should have seriously pursued joint organisational and legal frameworks to manage the entire GBM basin together with all five riparian states.”