With India expressing strong resentment at reports that China has already started building not one but several dams on the river, SAMUDRA GUPTA KASHYAP takes a look at the course of the Brahmaputra, its strategic importance, and reasons for which it is in the news now, other than the floods it is notorious for

Origin, journey

The Brahmaputra originates in the Kailash range of the Himalayas, south of Rake Kanggyen Tso (Gun Kyud) lake in south-west Tibet at an elevation of 5,300 metres, travels through the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, passes through the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, before cutting across the length of Bangladesh to meet the Ganges, and finally plunges into the Bay of Bengal. It travels 1,625 km in the west-to-east direction (in China), 918 km east-to-west in India and then 363 km north-to-south in Bangladesh, making it the only river on earth to flow in such contrasting directions. In India, it has 105 tributaries, about 25 in Tibet, some of which are much bigger than most of the other Indian rivers, except perhaps the Ganges.

Its strategic importance

The sixth largest river in terms of water resources, it carries approximately 20,000 cubic metres per second on average, which works out to an annual run-off of about 5,70,000 million cubic metres at Guwahati, and about 6,24,000 million cubic metres as it touches the Bay of Bengal. It also stands second for its annual suspended sediment load at 1,128 tonnes per sq km per annum. The Brahmaputra also has one of the largest catchment areas in the world —about 5,80,000 sq km, of which about 2,93,000 sq km are in Tibet (China), about 1,95,000 sq km in India, about 45,000 sq km in Bhutan, and the remaining 47,000 sq km in Bangladesh. There are altogether 612 glaciers in the Brahmaputra basin, of which 450 are in the Teesta sub-basin of Sikkim and 162 in the Kameng region in Arunachal.

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