Will continue to share river water data with India: China

BEIJING : Beijing said on Friday it will continue to cooperate with New Delhi on sharing river water data as two north-eastern states braced for an increase in the level of the Yarlung Tsangpo river following heavy rainfall i n southern China.

In a statement emailed to Hindustan Times, China’s foreign ministry said it had alerted Indian authorities about the increase in water volume in the middle reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo and advised them to prepare for an impact downstream.

The Yarlung Tsangpo is called Siang when it enters Arunachal Pradesh and becomes t he Brahmaputra in Assam after combining with two more rivers downstream.

The Chinese foreign ministry didn’t respond to a question on whether construction activities or landslides had impacted the water flow.

“Chinese water conservancy department has informed India about the situation and reminded the time of the 73-day standoff between Indian and Chinese troops at Doklam near the Sikkim border.

Beijing had then said it was unable to share data on the Yarlung Tsangpo as data collection centres in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) were being upgraded. The foreign ministry said the two countries had cooperated in the past on data related to trans-border rivers.

“For a long time, China and India have carried out a series of good cooperation in the areas of hydrological reporting, flood prevention and mitigation, and emergency response handling under the cross-border river expert mechanism,” the statement said.

In March, the issue of sharing water data was resolved during the 11th meeting of the IndiaChina expert-level mechanism on trans-border rivers. India and China signed an MOU on the margins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in June that enabled the Chinese side to provide hydrological data during the flood season from May 15 to October 15 every year.