The Pulse | Diplomacy | South Asia

Why the India-Bangladesh Ganges Treaty Renewal Must Deliver Real Security

The treaty will expire later this year. But it was not discussed during Bangladesh Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman’s recent visit to Delhi.

India’s foreign minister S Jaishankar and his Bangladeshi counterpart Khalilur Rahman shake hands at their meeting on April 8, 2026, during the latter’s visit to New Delhi, India.

Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman met his Indian counterpart, S. Jaishankar, in New Delhi on April 8.

While Dhaka carefully characterized Rahman’s visit as a “stopover,” en route to the Indian Ocean Conference in Mauritius on April 10-12 April, New Delhi just as cautiously labelled it as an “official visit.”

The semantic tension around their descriptions of the visit captures something larger about the state of ties between the two neighbors. Relations between the two countries are yet to be normalized.

After 18 months of strained relations, suspended political channels, and creeping mutual suspicion following the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government in August 2024, India and Bangladesh are navigating a diplomatic reset with considerable care.

During his visit to Delhi, Rahman met Jaishankar, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, and Petroleum Minister Hardip Puri. These meetings indicate that the two sides are keen to step up cooperation on trade, regional security, water sharing, healthcare, transit, and tourism. Bangladesh requested India to increase the supply of diesel and fertilizer to meet its domestic needs amid the ongoing energy crisis.

However, even as the two sides were exploring steps to improve ties, Bangladeshi nationals continue to be killed by India’s Border Security Force (BSF) along the frontier. This highlights the gap between expectations and reality in bilateral relations.

Importantly, the two countries did not discuss long-persisting bilateral problems, particularly over water sharing.

Bangladesh and India share 54 rivers. Of them, Bangladesh has managed to sign only one treaty, the Ganges Water Sharing Treaty. Bangladesh is looking to sign 14 more water-sharing treaties, including the Teesta Water Sharing Treaty. Notably, the discussions in Delhi did not include the impending expiration of the Ganges Water Sharing Treaty, which is set to lapse in December 2026.

Signed in New Delhi on December 12, 1996, by then-Prime Ministers H.D. Deve Gowda and Sheikh Hasina, the Ganges Waters Treaty has long been regarded as a cornerstone of India-Bangladesh cooperation — a 30-year framework for dividing dry-season flows that transformed what was once a deeply contentious upstream-downstream dispute into a rules-based sharing mechanism built on measurement, predictability, and mutual restraint.

For three decades, it seemed to have provided a degree of hydrological certainty to millions of Bangladeshi farmers, fisherfolk, and households who depend on the Padma river system for their livelihoods and lives. As the principal distributary of the Ganges, the Padma runs 356 km across Bangladesh, joining the Jamuna and Meghna before emptying into the Bay of Bengal, and its fertile floodplains remain central to agriculture, fisheries, and rural transport.

The Ganges treaty’s renewal will not simply be about dividing water; it will be about updating a 20th-century formula to meet 21st-century climate realities. And Bangladesh enters this negotiation from a position of vulnerability that it can no longer afford to downplay. “Renewing the Ganges water-sharing treaty will be a test of the relationship,” former Bangladeshi ambassador M. Humayun Kabir said. In an interview with NDTV, Rahman said that “achieving climate resilience through shared resources can be the foundation of bilateral relations for at least the next three decades.”

The core structural problem is one of geography and power asymmetry. Bangladesh sits at the terminal end of one of the world’s most densely populated river systems, receiving the combined flows of rivers that have already travelled thousands of kilometers through India before reaching the border.

The Farakka Barrage in West Bengal regulates what Bangladesh receives during the critical dry months of January through May. But Farakka is no longer the only variable. Upstream infrastructure construction, including hydroelectric and irrigation projects in the Himalayan catchment zones of Sikkim and across India’s northeastern states, has cumulatively altered the hydrology that the 1996 formula assumed.

The consequences downstream are measurable and worsening.

Reduced dry-season flows have accelerated the shrinkage of the Gorai River — the Ganges’ main distributary into southwestern Bangladesh — threatening the ecological integrity of the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove delta and a natural barrier against cyclones for tens of millions of Bangladeshis. Simultaneously, the monsoon calculus has also shifted: when upstream reservoirs release water during heavy rainfall events, downstream Bangladesh absorbs disproportionate flood risk. The same infrastructure that reduces dry-season flows can amplify wet-season surges.

Against this backdrop, any renewal of the........

© The Diplomat