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India has launched an investment drive targeting villages and infrastructure along its disputed northern border with China, in a bid to strengthen its presence on the ground amid heightened tensions between the world’s two most populous countries.
Amit Shah, India’s home affairs minister and a top deputy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, travelled on Monday to Arunachal Pradesh, a sparsely populated north-eastern territory, to inaugurate the scheme, which aims to boost living conditions and employment prospects in five states and territories that border China.
Arunachal Pradesh was the site of a violent clash in December between Chinese and Indian soldiers, in which both sides sustained injuries. China claims all of the contested territory as part of Tibet, and in 2015 summoned India’s ambassador to object after Modi visited the region.
China recently angered India by giving 11 locations in Arunachal Pradesh “standardised” names in Mandarin and Tibetan, the third time it has done so. New Delhi responded last week by describing the territory as “an inalienable part of India” and said Beijing would not alter the situation by “giving its own inventive names”.
The Vibrant Villages Programme scheme, which Shah introduced on Monday, will include investment in road and telecoms connectivity, drinking water, power generation and other projects, at Kibithoo, a village just south of the Line of Actual Control, as both countries refer to the roughly 3,500km border.
The plan follows what analysts said was an extensive Chinese campaign to upgrade poor rural settlements under its xiaokang programme to build a “moderately prosperous society”, partly through poverty alleviation.
In Tibet, the programme has a security component, with Beijing developing villages in remote regions near India and other neighbouring countries in exchange for residents’ political allegiance and assistance monitoring the border, analysts said.
China’s effort to cultivate border villages is just part of a massive infrastructure push in Tibet, where Beijing has also constructed roads, bridges, airports and military bases, especially near India.
According to a CSIS report in November, satellite imagery shows that the People’s Liberation Army has built a base near Pangong Tso, a high-altitude lake where Chinese and Indian troops clashed in 2020.
India and China fought a war along their border in 1962. In 2005, they agreed five principles of “peaceful coexistence”, which covered parts of the frontier dispute.
But the dispute remains unresolved, and last escalated into deadly violence in 2020 further to the west, in the Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh, where at least 24 Indian and Chinese troops were killed in a brawl. Chinese forces have since blocked their Indian counterparts from patrolling in two areas of the border zone.
Beijing on Monday said it opposed Shah’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh, which it said violated China’s territorial integrity.
The Vibrant Villages Programme was “a response to the Chinese programme of building model villages in border areas, and a means of asserting Indian claims in the border areas”, said Sushant Singh, senior fellow with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. “Both sides had agreed to the principle of not disturbing settled areas, and if India can show that these areas are settled . . . it helps Indian claims.”
India has struggled to entice residents to settle in the border area because of its harsh climate and the limited economic opportunities in one of the highest-altitude regions of the world.
“There has been a depopulation of mountain villages happening for quite some time, and a natural economic trend was for people to move away for jobs into the plains,” said Manoj Joshi, a distinguished fellow at India’s Observer Research Foundation think-tank.
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