Jaishankar tells Bihar its Ganga claim will sit in the Farakka treaty file

External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has told Janata Dal (United) Rajya Sabha member Sanjay Kumar Jha that any decision on renewing the 1996 Ganga Water Treaty with Bangladesh will weigh Bihar’s drinking-water and industrial needs. The letter is dated 28 August. Jha released his reply on 2 September.

The treaty, signed on 12 December 1996, governs dry-season flow at Farakka Barrage from January to May. It expires on 12 December 2026, thirty years to the day. Renewal is already on the diplomatic calendar for both capitals.

Jha, a former Bihar water resources minister and JD(U) national working president, had raised a Special Mention in the Rajya Sabha on 6 August. He asked the Centre not to roll the pact forward in its present form. He said the arrangement had worsened silt upstream of Farakka and left the state short in the lean months, when water is released toward Bangladesh under the sharing formula.

What the letter actually lists

Jaishankar wrote that the Jal Shakti Ministry had already run inter-ministerial consultations “to ensure broad-based consultation on the future of the treaty.” He named four dates on which an authorised representative of the Bihar government sat in the room: 22 August 2023, 30 October 2023, 15 March 2024 and 31 May 2024.

“We fully understand your concerns relating to the Ganga Water Treaty,” the letter said. “The government will take the appropriate decision while keeping these factors in focus.”

That is an assurance of process, not of a rewritten formula. The minister did not say the 1996 shares would change. He did not say they would stay. He recorded that Bihar has already been inside the file for three years.

The claim Bihar is putting on paper

Jha called the reply “a moment of satisfaction for every citizen of Bihar” and then restated the demand. He said the state was not asking for a favour. It wanted the share that “our own scientific assessment establishes, so that 13 crore people are not left short of drinking water, irrigation and industrial supply for another 30 years.” He tied the campaign to Nitish Kumar’s first term as chief minister and said JD(U) would keep pressing for a measured share of the Ganga and its tributaries inside Bihar.

Jha has also taken the file into a meeting with Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Jaishankar, attended with Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary. The political geometry is plain. JD(U) is in the National Democratic Alliance. Bihar’s water argument now sits inside the coalition, not only across the border.

Bangladesh will treat the same river as a downstream right. The 1996 text was written after years of dispute over Farakka, the 2.3-kilometre barrage in Murshidabad that diverts water into the Bhagirathi-Hooghly to keep Kolkata Port navigable. The dry-season formula is the core of the document. Change the formula and Dhaka has a different treaty. Leave it and Patna says it has another 30-year shortfall.

The calendar from here

Four months remain before expiry. The consultations Jaishankar listed stop in May 2024. Nothing in the published letter describes meetings in 2025 or 2026. That gap is the practical question for Jal Shakti and the MEA: whether Bihar’s 2023-24 presence is treated as sufficient consultation, or whether a new round is opened before December with updated lean-season data and a 2050 population projection, which Jha has asked the Centre to use.

A renewed treaty that ignores the upstream silt and lean-season case will be fought in Bihar as a 30-year lock-in. A revised formula that cuts Bangladesh’s dry-season share will be fought in Dhaka as a breach of a settled river pact. Jaishankar’s letter puts both pressures on the same desk. The decision still has to be written before 12 December.