THE recently concluded Bangladesh-India Joint River Commission (JRC) meeting held in New Delhi was crucial for Bangladesh, especially in the context of India’s unilateral move to implement a controversial programme aimed at linking 37 rivers to create 30 inter-basin links to transfer water from surplus to deficit basins.
The talks, held in Delhi on September 29 and 30, witnessed a lot of ups and downs revolving around the project. Finally, an ‘‘agreed minute’’ was signed following negotiations after midnight on the concluding day. But the agreement, as it appears in Dhaka, is still looked at with a degree of scepticism.
Dhaka believes that the river-linking project, if implemented, will have an enormous and all-round adverse impacts on the ecosystem, river morphology, agriculture, fisheries, industries, public health and salinity in soil, surface and ground water, and the overall economy of Bangladesh. Experts argue that the project would prove to be an Indian ‘weapon of mass destruction’ in Bangladesh.
The government of Bangladesh, the country’s civil society and the press have been voicing the same concerns, especially after President Abul Kalam declared on August 14 this year that India would go ahead with the project.
Six major Bangladeshi dailies, three private TV channels — not to mention a government controlled agency and television — sent their reporters to Delhi to cover the JRC meeting.
However, the Delhi talks reportedly began on a good note, with the Indian side agreeing to Bangladesh’s proposal for including, along with other contentious issues, the river-linking project in the agenda. Trouble began when the Indian side, led by Water Resources Minister Arjun Charan Sethy, turned 180 degree the next morning, by proposing to ‘withdraw’ the river-linking project from the agenda.
Bangladesh’s subsequent reaction, very sharp it was as reported in the Dhaka press, pushed the talks almost to a dead- end. Bangladeshi media reported, quoting Indian official sources, that Mr Sethy had received flak from the Indian foreign ministry for conceding to Bangladesh’s proposal to discuss the issue at the JRC meet. South block reportedly interpreted the Bangladeshi effort to include river-linking into the JRC agenda as ‘an attempt to internationalize the issue’. But Bangladesh refused to give in, and its delegation clearly hinted that it was prepared to leave Delhi without signing the joint minute, if the river- linking was stricken from the agenda.
It was a real stalemate. Indian Express ran a report on October 1 with the heading, ‘JRC stalemate: Dhaka seeks role’. The Times of India’s heading on the report was, ‘Bangla(desh) pours cold water on river-linking’. The Hindustan Times described the situation as ‘India-Bangladesh river talks in troubled waters’.
However, the deadlock ended in the early hours of October 1 when, following hours of ‘painful negotiations’, the Indian side agreed to retain the issue on the agenda and included it in the ‘agreed minutes’ of the meeting. India, however, included a note that the interlinking of rivers was ‘only at the conceptual level’.
During the talks, India agreed to release Ganges water, through the Farakka Barrage, in the lean season following the Ganges Water Treaty, 1996, a treaty which suffers from the absence of a guarantee clause for Bangladesh. India also assured Bangladesh that it would not build any structure to divert water through a dam planned for a hydroelectric power plant at Tipaimukh in Tripura, upstream of the Meghna, Surma and Kushiara rivers without prior consultation with Bangladesh.
No agreement was reached on sharing of the River Teesta, as India wanted to let only 17 per cent of Teesta water flow into Bangladesh while the latter claimed 50 per cent. The issue will be addressed at the next JRC meeting in Dhaka.
Besides, India said it would keep suspended construction of spurs on the Indian side of the Muhuri River until a dispute over a two-kilometre stretch of the border in the area was resolved through a visit to the spot by the authorities concerned.
On his return home, Bangladesh’s water resources minister claimed that inclusion of India’s river-linking project in the agenda was ‘a major outcome’ of the JRC talks. But he refused to describe the outcome as an ‘outright success’. “It is too early to make such a claim,” he told newsmen at a press conference in Dhaka on October 4.
Bangladesh has reasons to be skeptical about Indian assurances. India had claimed in 1951 that the Farakka Barrage project was still at a conceptual stage, but it went ahead with its implementation in 1970 without taking into consideration its possible adverse impact on Bangladesh.
Again, while opening the barrage in 1974, India assured Bangladesh that they were opening it ‘on an experimental’ basis, but the country is still operating the barrage, diverting crucial dry-season flows into Indian irrigation canals.
Bangladesh blames the barrage, over the Ganges close to Bangladesh territory, for dried-up fields, diseases and salinization of the vast Sundarbans mangrove swamp in the Ganges delta.