Staff Reporter :
An equitable share of Teesta River waters and the construction of the Ganges barrage, two most-discussed topics, have remained far from being resolved.
Despite attempts taken by the government several times, India has assured Dhaka only in words that the agreements pertaining to these two topics would be signed soon.
Against this backdrop, Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen urged his Indian counterpart Dr S Jaishankar to expedite initiatives to resolve the Teesta issue.
Momen told it to Indian foreign minister during a sideline meeting in Paris.
Bangladesh’s foreign minister is in Paris now to attend a programme on ‘European Union Ministrial Forum on Cooperation with the Indo-pacific’, a foreign ministry press release said on Tuesday.
The Indian foreign minister, the statement said, assured Momen of necessary Indian cooperation regarding the issues to be solved. Bangladesh’s minister reiterated the importance of sharing Teesta waters. Both the minister also discussed regarding Kushiara river water too, the staement said.
Teesta, the 400-km-long river shared by India and Bangladesh, has been, if not a bone of contention, a source of friction between the two neighbours for almost half a century now, especially since the construction of the Gajaldoba barrage upstream of the Teesta in West Bengal, India.Negotiations on the Teesta picked up steam only after the Ganga Treaty was signed in 1996 and culminated into a draft treaty which was to be signed in 2011 by the erstwhile PM Manmohan Singh of India and PM Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh during the former’s visit to Dhaka.
However, the last-minute refusal of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to support the provisions of the Teesta Treaty disrupted the negotiations and the treaty was not signed. Bangladesh has been trying to get the treaty signed ever since.
According to sources, the activities of the Joint Rivers Commission (JRC) have virtually stopped due to India’s go-slow policy. Though Bangladesh has already completed all necessary work to exchange data on six common rivers-the Manu, Muhuri, Khowai, Gumti, Dharla, and Dudhkumar-and technical committee reports on the Ganges Barrage, the Indian authorities are yet to respond positively, they say.
The sources also say that the Teesta deal has become uncertain due to the reluctance on the Indian side. The JRC’s ministerial-level meeting has not been held in the last 12 years.
However, Bangladesh has agreed to give 1.8 cusec water per second to India from the Feni River. This has irked many Bangladeshis who believe that any such deal should be put on hold unless India signs the treaty regarding the sharing of Teesta waters.
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina visited India twice on October 3 and November 22 in 2019, but the Indian government has failed to convince the government of West Bengal, one of the Indian states, to sign the Teesta deal.
The Teesta river water-sharing deal was postponed just hours before it was to be signed during former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit in September 2011 due to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s persistent opposition.
Since then, India maintains that it will ink the deal once it gets approval from the state government. Though the decades-old land boundary and maritime issues have been resolved, the topic of an equitable share of the Teesta river waters has remained unresolved.
The last ministerial-level JRC meeting with India was held in 2010.
