China said on Tuesday that its first major hydropower dam on the Brahmaputra river that was installed in November last year is now fully operational.

The dam at Zangmu, Tibet in the middle of the Brahmaputra, or Yarlung Zangbo as it is known in China, is now fully operational in all its six units, the dam's contractors, the Gezhouba Group, told the official Xinhua news agency.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said on Tuesday that officials and experts from both India and China were in constant communication over the issue. "We will take into consideration the concerns of the Indian side and remain in contact with them," she said.

The dam, which is Tibet's largest hydropower station, will produce 2.5 billion kilowatthours of electricity a year. Located on the river's middle reaches, it cost $ 1.5 billion. The first of the six units had been put to work in November.

The Zangmu dam is the first major hydropower dam on the Brahmaputra's middle reaches. China has in its current five-year plan also given the go-ahead to start work on three other dams, one of which is even bigger than the 510 MW Zangmu dam - a 640 MW dam scheduled for construction at Dagu, 18km upstream. Two smaller dams will be built at Jiacha and Jiexu.

To assuage concerns, both India and China last year had signed an agreement to allow Indian hydrological experts to conduct study tours to directly monitor the river's flow in Tibet and to extend provision of hydrological data in the flood season.

During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to China in May, both sides had also agreed to step up cooperation through an expert-level mechanism on the provision of flood-season hydrological data, emergency management and other transborder river issues.