Teesta Water Sharing Dispute

The Teesta Water Sharing Dispute arises from the transboundary character of the Teesta River, which originates in Sikkim, traverses West Bengal in India, and enters Bangladesh through Rangpur Division before joining the Brahmaputra. Unlike the Ganges, whose flows are governed by the Ganges Water Treaty of 1996, the Teesta has no binding allocation instrument. The legal architecture for India–Bangladesh water cooperation rests on the Joint Rivers Commission (JRC), established in 1972 under a statute of understanding signed by Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, which catalogues 54 shared rivers and is mandated to negotiate sharing arrangements. The Teesta has been on the JRC agenda since the late 1970s, but the absence of a treaty means that abstraction during the lean season—November to April, when flows fall sharply—remains contested under customary principles of equitable and reasonable utilisation drawn from international watercourse law.

Procedurally, a Teesta accord would follow the template of the 1996 Ganges Treaty: technical sub-committees of the JRC establish baseline dry-season discharge at a reference point, after which negotiators apportion percentages of available flow between the two riparians, with provisions for review and a guaranteed minimum. The contested reference point is the Gajoldoba barrage in West Bengal, where India diverts Teesta water into the Teesta-Mahananda canal system to irrigate the agriculturally critical districts of north Bengal. Downstream, Bangladesh operates the Teesta Barrage at Dalia in Lalmonirhat, commissioned to irrigate the Teesta Barrage Project command area. Both structures compete for the same diminished lean-season volume, and the negotiation reduces to dividing a quantity insufficient to satisfy both irrigation networks simultaneously.

The interim formula that nearly crystallised in 2011 proposed allocating roughly 37.5 percent of the dry-season flow to Bangladesh and 42.5 percent to India, reserving the balance for the river itself to maintain ecological flow. The arrangement was to be a fifteen-year interim agreement pending a comprehensive treaty. Crucially, water is a State subject under Entry 17 of the State List of the Seventh Schedule of the Indian Constitution, while inter-State and international river regulation falls to the Union under Entry 56 of the Union List. This federal tension gives the riparian State government a de facto veto over any accord the Union government negotiates, a constitutional friction central to the dispute's persistence.

The most consequential named instance occurred in September 2011, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh prepared to sign an interim Teesta agreement during his visit to Dhaka. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee withdrew from the delegation at the last moment, objecting that the proposed allocation would deprive north Bengal farmers, and the signing collapsed. The deadlock persisted through Prime Minister Narendra Modi's subsequent engagements with Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, including her June 2024 visit to New Delhi, after which India announced a technical team would visit Dhaka to discuss conservation and management of the Teesta. Separately, Bangladesh advanced a Chinese-financed Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project, drawing India's strategic attention to Beijing's footprint near the Siliguri Corridor.

The Teesta dispute must be distinguished from the Ganges Water Treaty framework, which is a concluded thirty-year instrument with a fixed sharing schedule at Farakka, whereas the Teesta has no treaty at all. It is also distinct from a purely inter-State Indian water dispute adjudicated under the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act 1956—such as the Cauvery dispute—because the Teesta is an international watercourse where the Union government, not a tribunal, is the negotiating authority. The conflict further differs from the boundary-centred Land Boundary Agreement of 2015, which resolved enclaves and was ratified through the 100th Constitutional Amendment; the Teesta is a resource-allocation problem, not a territorial one.

Controversy centres on the federalism question and on hydrological data disputes. West Bengal commissioned the Kalyan Rudra committee, which questioned whether sufficient lean-season flow exists to honour the 2011 formula without harming north Bengal. Climate variability, glacial-melt changes in the upper Sikkim catchment, and upstream hydropower cascades—including damage from the October 2023 South Lhonak Lake glacial outburst flood that destroyed the Teesta-III dam at Chungthang—have compounded uncertainty over baseline availability. Bangladesh, meanwhile, frames assured Teesta flow as essential to food security for roughly 21 million people in its northern basin, elevating the issue in every high-level bilateral dialogue. The political transition in Dhaka following the fall of the Hasina government in August 2024 introduced fresh uncertainty over the negotiating posture of both capitals.

For the working practitioner, the Teesta Water Sharing Dispute is a textbook illustration of how India's federal structure constrains its neighbourhood diplomacy and of the limits of the "neighbourhood first" policy when a State government's interests diverge from Union foreign-policy objectives. It demonstrates the strategic salience of transboundary rivers as instruments of influence, the risk that an unresolved bilateral grievance creates openings for external powers near sensitive geography such as the Siliguri Corridor, and the necessity of cooperative basin management institutions like the JRC. For civil-services aspirants and desk officers alike, the case anchors discussions of GS Paper II topics on India's relations with its neighbours, centre-State relations, and the governance of shared natural resources.