Bangladesh and India: Breaking the impasse on the Teesta water-sharing talks

But even before Prime Minister Hasina arrived in Delhi there was scepticism in some Bangladeshi quarters about this agreement’s timing. The International Farakka Committee (IFC) — a non-governmental body consisting of native and overseas Bangladeshis — issued a statement saying that water-sharing of the Kushiyara was not a priority for Bangladesh. The sudden move to have an agreement on the Kushiyara issue only serves to divert attention from the impasse on the far more urgent and consequential issue of sharing the waters of the river Teesta. Questions have already been raised in the Bangladeshi media on whether the prime minister’s visit to India has yielded any substantive gains for Bangladesh.

The IFC’s name bears testimony to the long history of water disputes in the country’s relations with India. The Farakka dispute precedes the founding of Bangladesh. The Farakka barrage across the river Ganga was commissioned in 1975, but its planning began soon after the Partition. By the time of the start of its construction in 1962, the barrage’s potential adverse effects on what was then East Pakistan had become a contentious issue in the relations between India and Pakistan.

The IFC’s name also evokes the May 1975 Long March led by the “Red Maulana”, Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, from Rajshahi in Bangladesh — near the Indian border — to the Farakka barrage in West Bengal. Bhashani’s goal was to focus attention on the supposed desertification of large areas in Bangladesh allegedly caused by the substantial reduction of the flow of water as the result of the Farakka barrage. Bhashani’s Farakka march, the IFC believes, has lessons for today since instances of unilateral diversion of water by constructing dams on shared rivers have only increased since then.

PM Hasina is often criticised by political opponents for her pro-India stance. Her failure to return home with an agreement on the Teesta issue makes her vulnerable to political attacks in the country’s general elections next year. To understand the reasons for the impasse on Teesta — the river that originates in the Himalayan mountains and flows through the states of Sikkim and West Bengal before entering Bangladesh — it may be rewarding to look back at a time when the two countries came close to signing an agreement. That was in 2011 just before the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Bangladesh. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee famously bowed out of the Indian delegation at the last minute because of reservations about the amount of water stipulated as the share of Bangladesh according to the draft agreement.

Since then, Banerjee has stated her position publicly on several occasions. In 2017, describing the Teesta as “the lifeline of north Bengal”, she said, “The Teesta does not have water to be shared”. But West Bengal will be happy to share with Bangladesh water from rivers that have water to spare, she said. Many commentators assume that Banerjee’s calculations are political. But the political landscape of today is very different from the one in 2011; yet Banerjee’s stance on the issue has not changed. Is partisan politics all there is to it?

Writing for The Third Pole — a platform covering the Himalayan watershed and the rivers originating there — Jayanta Basu has noted that, while the water flow on the Teesta has been decreasing, the demand for water from the river in north Bengal for paddy cultivation, tea plantations, and drinking water for the city of Siliguri, has been going up.

Basu cites scientific studies that point to the retreat of the Himalayan glaciers feeding the Teesta as a factor in the significant reduction in the water flow. Moreover, the Teesta now is a heavily dammed river. Several hydropower dams have been built in the upper catchment area of the river in the mountainous terrain of Sikkim. They are run-of-the-river plants that are not supposed to hold back water. But in their operation, they typically “impound” water for most of a 24-hour period to generate electricity during peak hours. The short periods during which water is released aren’t exactly designed to meet the water needs of agriculture and of urban water users. The political difficulties that chief minister Banerjee faces are clearly not going to be easy to get around for her, or for any other future leader of the state.

This summer, like the rest of the world, South Asian countries experienced extreme weather events that were very likely caused by climate change. The vulnerability of hydropower dams to melting glaciers as the result of climate change has also become quite apparent, not only in Sikkim but more dramatically in China’s heavily hydropower-dependent Sichuan province, where the rationing of electricity led major global manufacturers to suspend operations.

The late Ramaswamy R Iyer, a visionary thinker on water issues, once observed that water disputes rarely come up when a river is free flowing; they occur only when river engineering projects enter the picture. He lamented that official cooperation between countries on water-related issues takes place mostly in the context of harnessing rivers as a water resource. Other important matters such as the protection of waterbodies and aquifers from pollution and degradation, the preservation of wetlands, improving and maintaining water quality, drainage of river basins, the occurrence of arsenic in aquifers, coping with floods and riverbank erosion, water-harvesting and watershed development do not get the same kind of attention.

Perhaps it is time we consider having a moratorium on the engineering of the world’s last remaining free-flowing rivers — some of which, fortunately, are in these parts of the world — and rethink the framework of regional cooperation on water-related matters.

The writer is professor of Political Studies at Bard College, New York