India and Bangladesh share 54 transboundary rivers, yet have sharing agreements for only one – the Ganges.
It speaks to a lack of comprehensive, adaptive river governance across the region, which in a time of climate-induced water stress is likely to deepen mistrust and “erode the already fragile foundations of transboundary cooperation”, Swai said.
“Nationalistic politics in both India and Bangladesh have significantly undermined the ability to sustain long-term, equitable transboundary water agreements.
“Without urgent institutional innovation, climate change threatens to turn shared rivers into sources of sustained geopolitical friction,” he said.
And right now, he said, the India-Bangladesh water-sharing relationship is better understood as an example of power asymmetry than a model of cooperation.
Geopolitical calculations also weigh on both countries’ actions around water.
China’s activities on the upstream of the Brahmaputra, a transboundary river that flows through southwestern China, northeastern India and Bangladesh, loom large in regional water diplomacy.
China has recently started construction of the world’s largest hydro-electric power dam close to the city of Nyingchi in the southeast of the autonomous region of Tibet.
The US$167 billion project will retain waters of the Yarlung Tsangpo, which eventually flows into the Brahmaputra. India has conveyed its concern over the impacts of the dam, which could take a decade to construct.
It has prompted further calls within India for the country to build its own dam in the state of Arunachal Pradesh to counter China’s project, which could have further repercussions for Bangladesh, if water flow is further impacted by new river infrastructure.
Swai said that India and Bangladesh should work together, ideally with Nepal and Bhutan, to develop science-based governance architecture for the Ganges-Brahmaputra basin, to create a “united front” in response to China’s damming activities.
But there are signs that Dhaka has strategically aligned itself closer to Beijing in recent times.
Muhammad Yunus, the chief adviser of the interim government of Bangladesh, visited China in March to meet President Xi Jinping and signed multiple agreements and memorandums of understanding across diverse sectors, including infrastructure.
Bangladesh also secured investment, loan and grant commitments worth US$2.1 billion, including for an exclusive Chinese Industrial Economic Zone and an agreement for zero tariffs on Bangladeshi goods until 2028.
India will need to navigate the realities of that “growing” relationship, Sinha said, by managing not only geopolitics, but the concerns of its own riparian states internally too amid changing hydrological conditions.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/ganges-river-treaty-bangladesh-india-climate-change-5258566
