Bangladesh Needs India Deal to Solve Teesta Water Crisis
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- Bangladesh and China agreed during PM Tarique Rahman's June visit to deepen cooperation on the Teesta Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project and conduct a new joint feasibility study, replacing an earlier PowerChina proposal that had envisaged dredging 102 km of riverbed, repairing 80 km of embankments and building more than 124 km of new ones, plus reclaiming over 170 sq km of land.
- The Teesta's dry-season flow has collapsed to roughly 400 cusecs from a natural level of about 5,000 cusecs, disrupting more than 10 billion taka (~$81 million) in annual agricultural output, per the Bangladesh Water Development Board.
- A 2011 draft water-sharing formula proposed India receive 42.5% and Bangladesh 37.5% of the dry-season flow, with 20% left for the river — but the signing was scrapped during PM Manmohan Singh's planned Dhaka visit after West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee argued it would hurt her state's farmers.
- India offered in 2024 to send a technical team to discuss Teesta conservation — a move widely read as concern about a major Chinese role in a project near the Siliguri Corridor, the narrow land bridge connecting mainland India to its northeastern states.
- Jindal School's Sreeradha Datta told The Diplomat that "if the river does not have an adequate flow, no project can artificially increase it," and that any renewed negotiation must go beyond percentages to address farming systems and livelihoods on both sides of the border.
- Riverine People's Sheikh Rokon argued Bangladesh needs India's hydrological data and a formal agreement to establish riparian rights, warning that implementing the Chinese-backed master plan without one would effectively mean abandoning those rights.
- The Teesta carries roughly 49 million tons of sediment annually, requiring ongoing dredging and maintenance, and climate change is intensifying both monsoon floods and dry-season shortages in the basin.
Why it matters: For Bangladesh's northern farmers, the choice between Chinese-funded embankments and an Indian water-sharing deal is a false one — without Indian cooperation on upstream releases from the Gajoldoba Barrage in West Bengal, the Teesta will keep delivering ~400 cusecs in the dry season instead of the ~5,000 cusecs the river naturally carries, costing the region roughly $81 million in agricultural output each year.
