Strategy Without Consent: Why the Siang Mega-Dam Is Stalling Before It Starts

The Consent Gap India Cannot Engineer Around Start with

what the project is meant to do. The Siang Upper Multipurpose Project would generate 11,200 MW and hold about 9.2 billion cubic metres of live storage. The case is strategic. In December 2024, China approved a 60,000-MW cascade of five stations on the lower Yarlung Tsangpo, exploiting a drop of nearly 2,000 metres over about 50 km near the Indian border.

A large Indian reservoir downstream is pitched as a buffer against sudden releases or diversion and as a claim to the river's use. Now look at where the project stands. It is still at the pre-feasibility stage. Surveys and drilling need security forces in the Ugeng-Komkar area.

Four protesters were detained in early October under the Arunachal Pradesh Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 2014, which permits preventive detention for up to six months without trial. Prohibitory orders followed around Yingkiong and a forum of Adi farmers has called for a boycott of government consultations.

The project has not failed on funding or engineering. It is failing at the very first link in the chain: consent.

Why consent is the bottleneck The Adi fear displacement, loss of livelihoods and loss of ancestral land.

Local groups estimate that more than one lakh people could be displaced. Arunachal Pradesh is not a Sixth Schedule state. The Forest Rights Act, 2006, which requires gram sabha consent before forest land is diverted, applies there, but its implementation has historically been weak and customary tribal law governs land in practice.

That leaves consent without a clear institutional channel and security forces have stepped into the gap. The politics shows how fragile the strategic consensus is. In 2010, under a Congress state government, police raided the home of anti-dam activist Ojing Tasing, who then demanded that Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh scrap the Siang projects.

In 2012, BJP MP Tarun Vijay told the Rajya Sabha it was irresponsible to blame China for local protests. In 2014, Narendra Modi spoke in Pasighat of smaller hydropower projects. Today the positions are reversed. Tasing is a minister arguing for the dam and the Congress cites tribal consent against it.

Testing the

"first-user" claim The strategic argument assumes that building first gives India a right China must respect. Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People argues that no such right has a realistic basis in international law.

India and China are not parties to the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention, which sets out equitable use and the duty not to cause significant harm. India's actual leverage is narrower. A 2002 data-sharing arrangement covers only the flood season and an expert-level mechanism exists.

Thakkar's suggestion - insisting on project information and a joint impact assessment - targets the real risk without a legal claim India cannot enforce.

The seismic dimension The site lies in India's highest seismic hazard zone.

The 1950 Assam-Tibet earthquake struck this same eastern Himalayan region. A 9.2-BCM reservoir in that terrain is a hazard in its own right, which is part of why the Lower Subansiri project stood stalled for eight years. For the examiner, the lesson is sharp. Strategic necessity can justify studying a dam. It cannot replace the consent of the people the dam will displace.