Ganga waters, sharing between Bangladesh. India
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Treaty on Sharing of the Ganga Waters at Farakka
As of 2026
Sanjay Kumar Jha, August 20, 2026: The Times of India
India should seriously consider whether we need to renew the 1996 India-Bangladesh Ganga Water Treaty – formally the Treaty on Sharing of the Ganga Waters at Farakka – as the 30-year deadline nears. Bihar has lost much due to this treaty in the last three decades, and we should consider it appropriate to flag our pressing concerns and anxiety, as so much has changed during this period. Instead of adjustment at the margins, our position should be that this instrument, in this form, must not be carried into a fourth decade, in the interest of Bihar and the country.
The treaty was a child of the Gujral Doctrine: the proposition that India as South Asia’s largest country should extend unilateral concessions to neighbours without expecting reciprocity. Whatever its merits, its bill was sent to a single state. When Bihar’s rights were conceded in Dec 1996, Lalu Prasad Yadav sat at the heart of the United Front govt, while then Congress president supporting that govt from outside, Sitaram Kesri, was himself a Bihari. Both were silent on the consequences for Bihar.
Consider what the treaty asks of Bihar. Its obligations are written at Farakka: a 50:50 division whenever there is 70,000 cusecs or less of river water, with 35,000 cusecs guaranteed to each country in three alternating 10-day periods between March 11 and May 10. However, that volume of water is simply not available in the river when it enters Bihar. At Buxar, Ganga carries roughly 14,000 cusecs in those months. Close to three-quarters of the lean-season flow reaching Farakka is generated within Bihar’s own 445km stretch. Thus, only one state underwrites an international commitment while being denied its ordinary riparian rights.
Since the Farakka barrage was commissioned in 1975 to keep Kolkata Port navigable, silt that once travelled to the sea settles upstream instead. Ex-CM Nitish Kumar has argued for two decades what engineers now largely concede: Ganga’s aviralta (uninterrupted flow) is broken, its bed is rising along its entire Bihar course, and water that once stayed in the channel now stands in villages. Then the river turns and starves us. Groundwater is falling not only in south Bihar’s drought districts, but also in flood-prone districts of Darbhanga and Madhubani. Reservoir storage has averaged barely 35% of capacity over five years.
Some vouch for renewal with adjustments. But record does not support that hope. Bihar did exactly what Centre asked: we assessed our requirement to 2050 and placed a demand for 2,000 cusecs before the committee constituted by GOI. The committee’s final report provides 900 cusecs, less than half, for drinking water and industry alone, with irrigation excluded and no published reasoning for the cut. If Bihar’s own calculations can be halved within our own system, renewal will not be the moment our claim is finally honoured.
This is where the national case begins. The treaty has served India poorly. The country accepted a 30-year lock-in with no meaningful exit and no reciprocal guarantee, nothing on the Teesta, nothing on the wider basin. Dhaka today links the breadth of the bilateral relationship to renewal, which tells you where the leverage sits. The hydrology has moved too. The 1996 formula rests on flow records from the middle of the last century, compiled before Himalayan glacial retreat and the collapse of dry-season predictability. Committing another 30 years to that arithmetic in a climate-altered basin is not continuity. It is negligence dressed as continuity.
There is a deeper objection of principle. India has never scientifically apportioned the Ganga among the states that feed it; there is no settled allocation for Uttarakhand, UP, Bihar, Jharkhand or West Bengal. A nation cannot responsibly commit abroad what it has not first allocated at home. To renew before that allocation is worked out repeats the errors of 1996 at greater cost. Because Bihar in 2026 is not the Bihar of 1996: it had roughly 7.3cr people then and now has more than 13cr, while our entitlement has stayed frozen.
Let’s be clear about what non-renewal means. It is not hostility towards Bangladesh, nor the abandonment of water sharing. Dec 12, 2026, is not a rupture; it is the date a fixed-term contract ends. India should let it end and negotiate afresh, preceded by a scientific allocation among the basin states, built on current hydrological data rather than 1950s’ records, carrying shorter review cycles and a real exit clause, and providing at minimum the 2,000 cusecs Bihar’s assessment establishes for drinking water, irrigation, and industry. The National Silt Management Policy must at last be notified.
In 1996 Bihar was not in the room, and the country was assured generosity abroad would be its own reward. Thirty years of data have belied that. A treaty that floods one state in July and parches it in April, binds the Union to arithmetic older than most of its citizens, and purchases no reciprocity cannot be renewed by default. It should be allowed to expire. India can then negotiate again: from knowledge, from strength, and this time with Bihar in the room.
The writer is a member of Rajya Sabha and Bihar’s former minister for water resources
