THE 1996 Ganges Water Sharing Treaty (GWT) between India and Bangladesh was never designed to last forever. Its architects knew this. They gave it a 30-year term, assuming that three decades would be sufficient for the two countries to develop the trust, the data, and the institutional maturity to negotiate something better. That deadline falls in December 2026. The negotiations now underway suggest that not one of these goals has been achieved. The climate crisis has made the stakes considerably higher than anyone imagined in 1996.

For Pakistan, watching from the west, this may seem a distant bilateral dispute. The principles being contested at Farakka go to the heart of how South Asia will manage shared rivers in a warming world. They are the same principles at stake on the Indus. What Bangladesh and India negotiate will either set a precedent for climate-adaptive water diplomacy in this region or confirm that the old zero-sum logic still rules.

The climate argument: What is striking about the current impasse is that both sides are invoking climate change to support diametrically opposed positions. Bangladesh argues that the accelerating Himalayan glacial retreat and shifting monsoon patterns have made the treaty’s fixed volumetric allocations unworkable, that climate change has destroyed the earlier hydrological baseline, and that any renewal must incorporate dynamic, flow-responsive provisions that pro­t­ect Bangladesh’s guaranteed minimum supply regardless of what nature delivers upstream. Indi­­an negotiators, by contrast, argue that reduced basin-wide flows make it harder to honour existing commitments, and that the upstream storage infrastructure that Bangladesh objects to is precisely what India needs for its own climate adaptation. Both........

© Dawn