Bangladesh presses India before Ganges water treaty expires

With a 30-year Ganges water-sharing treaty with India expiring in December, Bangladesh fears failure to strike a new deal could deepen water shortages, threatening tens of millions of livelihoods. In Bangladesh’s parched Barind region, 72-year-old Bikash Soren remembers when the Ganges river flowing in from neighbouring India carried large boats past his village year-round. “For almost three months a year, you hardly see the river flowing,” the Protestant priest said. Two farmers died by suicide last season, he added, after dwindling water levels left their rice and wheat crops in tatters. Shrinking flows in the Ganges have also slashed fish catches in the river, known in Bangladesh as the Padma. “Where will we find fish now? ” said Abu Bakar Siddique, 55, who has switched to fish farming in ponds. “I used to catch many kinds.

” The 2,525-kilometre Ganges flows through the world’s most populous river basin, home to 655 million people including more than 50 million in Bangladesh, according to the World Bank. This aerial photograph taken on October 13, 2026 shows wetlands along the Padma river at Ramnathpur village, near the Bangladesh-India frontier in Bangladesh’s Rajshahi division. —AFP/File The 1996 treaty, which expires on December 12, governs dry-season water sharing at India’s Farakka Barrage, 20 kilometres upstream of Bangladesh. But Bangladesh needs a new deal based on “mutual benefit and respect”, Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir, a prime ministerial adviser who heads a technical committee on water-sharing, told AFP . Water arguments over 54 cross-border rivers between India and Bangladesh stretch back decades, and the Ganges is among the most important. Malik Fida A. Khan, a former Bangladeshi member of the Joint Rivers Commission (JRC), the body overseeing…