Correcting the Asymmetry: Why Bangladesh Needs UN-Backed Neutrality in the Ganges Water Negotiations

I first learned to think of rivers as questions of survival, not just geography, from the late Dr. Mohammad Moniruzzaman Miah, the visionary Dhaka University vice-chancellor and geographer whose work shaped a generation of Bangladeshi thinking on transboundary water. In the years when Khaleda Zia’s government stood firm in defending Bangladesh’s water rights, I was part of the technical effort that helped galvanize opposition to India’s proposed 1,500 MW Tipaimukh Dam on the Barak River in Manipur — a fight documented in the broader scholarly record of that transnational resistance movement. That episode taught a lesson Bangladesh cannot afford to forget as it approaches the next deadline in its water diplomacy: December 2026, when the landmark 1996 Ganges Water Treaty expires.

The Ganges Treaty, signed in December 1996, was hailed as a diplomatic breakthrough — the first long-term water-sharing arrangement between India and Bangladesh. But thirty years on, its formula looks less like fairness and more like a structural handicap for the downstream nation. Under the treaty, dry-season flow at the Farakka Barrage (January 1 to May 31) is divided in alternating ten-day blocks. When total flow is 70,000 cusecs or less, the two countries split it 50-50. But when flow reaches 75,000 cusecs or more — precisely the scenario Bangladesh needs most, during peak dry-season stress — India takes a fixed 40,000 cusecs off the top, and Bangladesh gets only the remainder. In practice, the treaty guarantees India a floor while leaving Bangladesh’s share to fluctuate with whatever is left. For a delta nation of 175 million people, dependent on the Ganges-Padma system for irrigation, drinking water, fisheries, and salinity control, that asymmetry has never been sustainable. It is even less so now, as climate change intensifies dry-season scarcity and accelerates saline intrusion along the coast.

Bangladesh is not asking for charity. It is asking for a renewed, predictable framework that reflects present-day hydrological and demographic realities — not the assumptions of three decades ago. That renewal must also confront a public health emergency that the original treaty never anticipated: the mobilization of naturally occurring arsenic into the very groundwater tens of millions of Bangladeshis depend on for drinking water.

The mechanism is worth explaining plainly. Reduced dry-season flow in the Ganges limits natural flushing and recharge of shallow aquifers. Farmers and municipalities, deprived of adequate surface water, turn increasingly to groundwater pumping for irrigation and drinking supply. That heavy extraction alters subsurface flow and oxygen conditions, encouraging microbial processes that break down buried organic carbon and release arsenic bound in iron-rich sediments — arsenic that occurs naturally in the geology of the Bengal delta. It’s important to be precise here: most researchers attribute the origin of this arsenic primarily to natural, geogenic sources within the delta’s Holocene sediments, not to the Farakka Barrage itself. But many Bangladeshi hydrologists and public health researchers argue, credibly, that reduced Ganges flow and the resulting over-reliance on groundwater pumping act as an accelerant — turning a latent geological hazard into an active public health catastrophe. Whatever the precise weighting of causes, the outcome is not in dispute: Bangladesh is living through what the World Health Organization has called the largest mass poisoning of a population in history.

The economic toll is staggering and measurable. Studies estimate that arsenic contamination has reduced Bangladesh’s effective rural labor supply by roughly 8 percent — a contraction larger than the labor-market shock the United States experienced during the Great Recession. Projections suggest arsenic-related mortality and morbidity could cost the economy up to $13 billion over twenty years in lost productivity alone. Millions of person-days are lost annually to arsenicosis, and the neurotoxic effects on children threaten the cognitive development of the next generation — a bottleneck on Bangladesh’s long-term growth prospects. Contaminated irrigation water enters the food chain, straining agricultural yields and export credibility. At the household level, families spend hundreds of millions of taka annually on treatment, exhausting savings and pushing the rural poor deeper into poverty. Visible skin lesions bring social stigma, job loss, and marginalization, particularly for women. This is not an abstract environmental dispute; it is a slow-moving national emergency with a very real balance sheet.

This debate does not exist in isolation. It sits alongside Bangladesh’s long-stalled push for a Teesta River sharing agreement, another dispute where upstream control and India’s domestic politics — particularly in West Bengal — have repeatedly delayed progress. Dhaka has made clear that a fair, long-term renewal of the Ganges pact is now central to the broader trajectory of India-Bangladesh relations. The two issues are linked in substance as much as in diplomacy: both test whether the region can move from a “mercantile” approach to shared rivers, in which every cusec is treated as a zero-sum resource to be captured upstream, toward an approach that treats water as a shared trust with obligations that flow downstream as well as up.

Given this, the renewal of the Ganges Treaty must do more than reallocate cusecs. It must treat adequate, dependable freshwater flow as a public health intervention, not merely an irrigation input. Diluting arsenic concentrations in shallow aquifers, sustaining natural flushing, and reducing pressure to over-pump groundwater all depend on Bangladesh receiving a demonstrably larger and more reliable share of dry-season Ganges flow than the 1996 formula allows.

Given the scale of what’s at stake — public health, food security, and the credibility of a 175-million-person delta nation’s future — this renewal should not be negotiated behind closed doors on India’s terms alone. Bangladesh should press for the process to include independent, internationally recognized water and public health experts, convened under UN auspices, to assess minimum flow requirements against verifiable arsenic, salinity, and agricultural data. This is not a call to internationalize a bilateral treaty in perpetuity; it is a call for technical objectivity in setting the numbers that will govern Bangladesh’s water security for the next generation. India, for its part, has its own legitimate claims — competing agricultural demand in West Bengal, and domestic political constraints that any Indian government must navigate. A durable agreement will need to account for those realities too, even as it corrects the imbalance embedded in the original formula.

Dr. Miah spent his career insisting that rivers were not lines on a map but lifelines for a nation’s health and dignity. That is the standard by which Bangladesh’s negotiators should measure whatever framework replaces the 1996 treaty.

My own survey of the river’s course through Bangladesh — from the point the Ganges crosses the border near Rajshahi as the upper Padma, through Kushtia and Pabna, to Goalundo Ghat in Rajbari district where it merges with the Jamuna — traces precisely the stretch where the crisis is most acute. This is the reach where dry-season flow drops lowest relative to demand, where shallow tube-well dependence is heaviest, and where arsenic contamination in groundwater is most severely documented. It is not a coincidence that the geography of reduced flow and the geography of arsenic exposure overlap so closely along this corridor; it is the clearest on-the-ground evidence that flow and public health are inseparable here.

Based on that survey, my recommendation is direct: any renewed treaty must guarantee Bangladesh a larger, non-discretionary share of dry-season Ganges flow, with dilution of arsenic-laden shallow aquifers along the Rajshahi-to-Goalundo Ghat corridor treated as an explicit, named objective of the agreement — not an incidental benefit of irrigation-focused allocation. Flow guarantees calculated only for agriculture and navigation, as in 1996, are not sufficient; the formula must be recalculated against verified public health thresholds for this reach specifically.

The upcoming renegotiation of the 1996 Ganges Water Sharing Treaty must not be left to bilateral negotiations alone, given the inherent asymmetry of leverage between India and Bangladesh. To prevent the next thirty years from being settled by power dynamics rather than ecological necessity, the process should be conducted in the presence of unbiased, internationally recognized water, hydrogeology, and public health experts convened under the auspices of the United Nations. This independent body must be mandated to verify upstream flow data, assess transboundary aquifer depletion, and audit arsenic exposure levels along Bangladesh’s reach before any water allocation figures are finalized. Far from stripping either nation of sovereign ownership over the agreement, establishing this transparent, evidence-based baseline provides an objective foundation essential to preserving public health and saving the Ganges Delta from severe ecological degradation.

December 2026 is not far away. Bangladesh’s diplomats, scientists, and civil society have little time left to ensure that the next thirty years of water sharing do not repeat the failures of the last thirty — and, above all, to save the delta from a slow-moving public health disaster that a fairer share of water could meaningfully arrest.