Fifty-seven transboundary rivers feed into Bangladesh, carrying an enormous volume of water flow. And Bangladesh shares 54 of these rivers with India. These rivers effectively create one of the world’s largest riverine drainage basins, the Ganges--Brahmaputra--Meghna (GBM) Basin. The GBM river systems drain a total catchment area of 1.72 million square kilometres through Bangladesh into the Bay of Bengal. As the lower riparian country within the GBM Basin, Bangladesh is highly dependent on and susceptible to run-off from India, with over 90% of the country’s surface water provided by out-of-country sources.
This dependency manifests in the contradictory and polarizing challenges of water scarcity and flooding caused not only by monsoonal rainfall patterns and variability, but also by the water management practices of India, including planned interventions, that is, building of dams, and water diversions.
Despite the fact that no other countries in the world share between them such a gigantic volume of transboundary waters, Bangladesh and India have only one long-term water-sharing agreement between them on the Ganges. In absence of a functional mechanism for equitable water sharing of 53 other common rivers, the riverine environmental stress is now a challenge to Bangladesh, with long-term consequences for food security, health, and development in the region.
For an agonizingly long period, Bangladesh and India have been in talks to conclude water sharing arrangements on few other common rivers, ie, Teesta, Manu, Muhuri, Khowai, Gumti, Dharla, Dudhkumar, and Kushiyara. Most unfortunate part in this whole episode of water talks is that we’ve witnessed a serious “lack of engagement” when it comes to walking the talk at institutional level.
For over a decade, we’ve seen how technical talks on transboundary rivers were put on back burner while rhetorical assurances at highest political level also came to naught, much to the misery of people living on the lower riparian nation -- who have long been at the receiving end of high floods in monsoon and water-starved during the dry season.
When a Teesta deal fell through owing to India’s failure to reach a domestic consensus in 2011, not only had it cast a long shadow over the prospect of an otherwise imminent water sharing treaty but also sent the two countries water dialogue instrument -- the Joint Rivers Commission (JRC) -- to a 12-year hiatus. The Bangladesh-India JRC -- which the two countries formed very prudently as a crucial water dialogue mechanism right after the emergence of Bangladesh --sat 37 times in between 1972 to 2010 but its meeting was held only once in all these years since 2011.
During their time in the governments -- Sheikh Hasina and Narendra Modi -- we saw highly technical issues like river water sharing and seasonal flow and dam management increasingly slipping from the grips of the JRC to the whims of top political leaderships. On onehand, there were no meetings of JRC in between 2011 to 2021 and on the other hand lots of “false hopes” at highest political levels that Teesta deal would be struck at their (Hasina and Modi) times in office.
They used to give the people an impression that if only Awami League in Bangladesh and BJP in India keep coming to power over and again, deals like Teesta would have a chance otherwise, not. But in reality, ever since the West Bengal chief minister expressed her reservation on the Teesta water deal in 2011, we’ve not heard anything over the past 13 years about Delhi taking any serious move to bring West Bengal on board.
After the 2010 meeting of JRC, the only time the ministerial level meeting of the JRC took place in the last 13 years was on August 25 in 2022. At that meeting, held in Delhi, both Bangladesh and India agreed to take up some more common rivers into focus for exchange of data and information towards the preparation of the draft framework of the interim water sharing agreement. Bangladesh also requested the conclusion of the long-pending Teesta water sharing treaty at an early date. The Indian side assured of their utmost efforts in concluding the agreement. But nothing happened.
Bangladesh and India’s talk over harnessing the transboundary waters should have been guided by a prudent hydro-diplomacy that involves the use of diplomatic instruments making shared water resources a domain for peace and cooperation rather than for conflict. But the way Delhi and the immediate past government in Dhaka approached the transboundary water management, it largely remained entrenched in political relationships of two ruling regimes, not serving the interests of the millions living on both sides of these rivers.
As an agrarian and riverine country, Bangladesh is dependent on river water for human consumption, crop irrigation, fisheries, transportation, and conservation of biodiversity. With rapid industrialization and population growth in the region, agrarian demand for water is also competing with hydropower and industrial demand. In parts of the GBM Basin there are disturbing signs of decreasing dry-season river flows with serious consequences for agricultural yields and groundwater replenishment.
The importance of Teesta
People living in Sikkim, West Bengal, and vast tracts of northern Bangladesh depend largely on the Teesta water and its ecosystem for their livelihoods. Teesta is the fourth largest among the 54 transboundary rivers between Bangladesh and India. Over the years, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, both these countries built barrages to harness Teesta waters serving national interests. The Indian side of the barrage is largest in entire Eastern India while Bangladesh’s largest barrage is also the Teesta barrage.
Since the commissioning of the controversial Farakka Barrage in the 1970s, India’s most arbitrary and unilateral water diversion move was the building of the Gajoldoba Barrage in the later part of the 1990s. Despite Bangladesh’s repeated insistence, India built it to divert water from Teesta, taking a substantial flow to other parts of West Bengal and allegedly to Bihar too.
As a result, Bangladesh’s over 100,000 hectares of irrigation command area under its Teesta Barrage Phase-I reduced to less than a fifth in want of dry season flow from Teesta and the country finally had to cancel the planned second phase of the Teesta barrage in 2004.
I have been following waters since the mid-1990s and am a witness to Sheikh Hasina-Deve Gowda historic Ganges water agreement in the winters of 1996. I still remember a late September afternoon in 2005 when the visiting water resources minister of India, Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, told local press that the available water flow in the Teesta now appears to be insufficient for both India and Bangladesh, and India proposed that neither side go for any new barrage building.
Hafiz Uddin Ahmed was helming Bangladesh’s water ministry then. I had asked Dasmunsi the hard question -- “Why is India saying it now after diverting Teesta water by building the Gajoldoba barrage on top of another barrage on Teesta it already had? And, how Bangladesh’s legitimate share in Teesta waters was going to be ensured now?”
He customarily replied no waters were diverted but knew very well that was not the fact. And Hafiz Uddin told him that Bangladesh had to forgo the second phase of its own Teesta barrage project in want of water. Dasmunsi told reporters at that press conference, held on the sideline of the JRC meeting, that the available water flow in the Teesta was not sufficient for India and Bangladesh, which is why both sides had to sacrifice in reaching an interim water sharing arrangement. I remember receiving a personal letter from Dasmunshi, a Bengali in Manmohan’s cabinet, two weeks later -- praising me for asking that question.
Years later it also became clear to me why West Bengal has some of its own issues with Delhi when it comes to water sharing of Teesta. Originating in India's Sikkim, Teesta enters Bangladesh through West Bengal. Mamata has been opposing the water deal based on the argument that if India commits to certain cusecs of guaranteed water share from Teesta to Bangladesh, her state might be deprived of water during the dry season.
In a subsequent development, Mamata commissioned an expert, Kalyan Rudra, to give a report on Teesta water sharing prospects. The Rudra report, submitted in 2012, has never been made public but Indian media reported on several instances that the report had stated that there was a shortage of water in Teesta since the Indian government had been building hydro-power projects upstream.
Transboundary waters: Global scenario
According to the United Nations Water (UN-Water) estimation, transboundary waters account for 60% of the world’s freshwater flows. The Geneva-based UN-Water, an interagency mechanism that coordinates the efforts of United Nations entities and international organizations working on water and sanitation issues, says that though 153 countries have territory within at least one of the 310 transboundary river and lake basins in the world, only 24 countries have all of their transboundary basins covered by cooperation arrangements.
Only 43 counties sharing transboundary waters have operational arrangements covering 90% or more of their shared rivers, lakes, and aquifers. At least 20 countries lack any arrangements for sharing transboundary waters and only eight countries have improved their cooperation with neighbouring governments on transboundary water resources between 2020 and 2023
UN-Water says: “Water can create peace or spark conflict. When water is scarce or polluted, or when people are unequal or have no access to water, tensions can rise between communities and countries. More than 3 billion people worldwide depend on water that crosses national borders. Yet, only 24 countries have cooperation agreements for all their shared water.”
As climate change impacts increase and populations grow, there is an urgent need, within and between countries, to unite around protecting and conserving the world’s most precious resource, water. The world must act upon the realization that water is not only a resource to be used and competed over -- it is a human right, intrinsic to every aspect of life.
In our part of the world -- there are, of course, at least some examples of amicable dispute resolutions on transboundary water sharing -- from where both Bangladesh and India can draw inspiration provided respective governments free the hydro diplomacy from the clasp of “political whims” to technical hands and institutional mechanisms like JRC.
There are examples like the treaties on transboundary river water signed between India and Pakistan (the Indus Waters Treaty), India and Nepal (the Kosi Agreement, Gandaki River Treaty and Mahakali Treaty), and finally India and Bangladesh (the Ganges Water Treaty). There are obviously many good lessons to learn from some of the drawbacks in all of these treaties -- lack of guarantee clause in the case of Ganges water sharing etc. But there is no point in stalling or slowing down the whole water dialogue process after one “failure” in 2011 (in the case of Teesta deal).
Over the past 50 years, India has built dozens of dams and barrages in the upstream of many common rivers and unless Bangladesh has some sort of agreed upon instruments to base on, it needs to raise issues as and when needed for saving its people from the sudden onrush of too much water during monsoon and scarcity of water during the dry season.
Reaz Ahmad is Executive Editor, Dhaka Tribune.
