Water Agreement Between India And Bangladesh

Neither rainfall over the Ganges basin nor the course of the dry season from the Ganges to Faracca changed significantly in the post-Faracca and post-Treaty period (as shown in Figure 3(a) to 3(c)). However, the dry season flow from the Ganges to the Hardinge Bridge decreased significantly in the post-Faracca period (Figure 3(d) and Appendix D, available online), although precipitation in the basin increased during the dry season during the same period. It clearly shows how the regulation of the river at the Farakka Dam affected Bangladesh in the post-Faracca period. Surprisingly, the situation in Bangladesh has not improved significantly since the signing of the treaty in 1996; The dry season at Hardinge Bridge was only slightly increased in the post-treaty period compared to the post-Faracca period. The cumulative amount of precipitation relative to the cumulative flow of the Ganges at Faracca and Hardinge Bridge and the associated nonparametric trends and their confidence intervals were also analyzed (see Appendix E for more details, available online). The slope between the cumulative dry season precipitation and the cumulative dry season flow at hardinge Bridge was 19.134 m3/s/mm for the period off Faracca, then decreased to 7.619 m3/s/mm in the post-Faracca period and improved slightly to 9.92 m3/s/mm for the post-contract period, this shows that the contract does not significantly improve the current dry season flow situation in Bangladesh. This tension goes back to the policies of the British colonial era, in which modernization and development projects took precedence over maintaining the ecological balance of river basins. This resulted in the construction of the port of Calcutta, an important trade and navigation center of the Bhagirathi-Hoogly river system (Mukherjee 2011). However, the construction of the harbour was short-sighted and did not take into account environmental factors – such as changes in the course of the river and sedimentation.

This required a long-term solution, which was envisaged in the form of a dam (ibid.). Another worsening of the situation was the division of 1947, marked by enormous loss of life, territorial and water-related conflicts and long-term struggles. The division also showed that the sharing of the waters of the Ganges was motivated more by political objectives than by environmental considerations. This is evident in the case of Murshidabad, a Muslim-majority region attributed to India (not East Pakistan), as it contained the starting point of the Bhagirathi Hoogly River (Kawser & Samad 2016). .