Do Bangladesh and India still need the Ganges Treaty?

ملخص مفصل

Thirty years of Ganges Treaty data challenge Indian and Bangladeshi assumptions about water sharing and downstream guarantees.

The Ganges Water Sharing Treaty expires on 12 December. Thirty years of joint observation and allocation at Farakka will end with it unless something takes their place, and the record those thirty years have produced has not been closely examined in public.

It is worth reading because almost every finding in it contradicts something believed in one capital or the other. The allocation formula was implemented better than the argument in Dhaka assumes. The river's gain between the two gauges is real, but it has never been quantified publicly. And the alternating ten-day guarantee that both governments treat as the treaty's central protective mechanism largely does not survive the journey downstream, so it is not doing what either believes. The numbers that follow come from the public record. The narratives depend on who is reading and how.

The record covers 450 ten-day periods: thirty dry seasons from 1997 to 2026, fifteen periods each from 1 January to 31 May. Every period carries four quantities: total flow available at Farakka, the release to India, the release to Bangladesh, and the flow observed at Hardinge Bridge, downstream inside Bangladesh and below the Mahananda confluence. The data come from the Joint Rivers Commission's published record.

One caveat belongs at the beginning rather than in a footnote because it limits what can objectively be claimed from the record.

In all 450 periods over the last 30 years, availability at Farakka is exactly the sum of the two releases. Availability is therefore an accounting quantity, not an independent measurement, so testing whether the releases followed the formula shows that an agreed account is internally consistent. It does not confirm what the river actually did.

The Hardinge Bridge observation sits outside this availability accounting.

Of 450 releases to Bangladesh, 375 were within 0.5 cusec of the formula applied to recorded availability, and 384 within 1 cusec.

One year accounts for most of the surplus.

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