The fresh revelation was made at a time when India and China's  soldiers were engaged in a bitter standoff on the Galwan Valley leading to heavy casualties.

China has sent bulldozers to divert the course of a river near the disputed border where Chinese and Indian soldiers fought in a deadly clash at 14,000 feet on Monday, satellite images suggest, reports Daily Mail. 

The images appear to show China deploying new machinery and damming a river in the Himalayan mountainside where tensions boiled over into the worst violence on the border since 1967, the British newspaper reports.

The satellite pictures, taken by Earth-imaging company Planet Labs, show signs of altering the landscape of the valley through widening tracks, moving earth and making river crossings, one expert told the newspaper.

'Looking at it in Planet, it looks like China is constructing roads in the valley and possibly damming the river,' Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at California's Middlebury Institute of International Studies, was quoted as saying by the  newspaper.

In a violent standoff between the soldiers of the two neighbouring nations last week at least 20 Indian Army men were killed. The casualty on the Chinese side is not known as China did not provide any death toll though reports said it also suffered heavy losses.