A miracle rescue gives Nepal’s search teams fresh hope as the flood death toll passes 1,200, with thousands still missing. The writer highlights a “time bomb” for the region as China presses ahead with a mega-hydropower project that he argues poses downstream risks for India.
Beginning in July 2025, following its approval at the end of the previous year, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) embarked on a colossal $167 billion hydropower project in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).
Planned to generate around 60 gigawatts when completed in the early 2030s, the scheme comprises five cascading stations along the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River, which flows into India as the Siang and later becomes the Brahmaputra.
It is a pharaonic enterprise, but it poses a dire question: will China pursue it even at a potentially enormous human cost?
The project is, in fact, a time bomb. The South China Morning Post reported that an active fault line runs directly beneath the world’s largest hydropower project, posing a threat to the mega-dam now under construction.
