Jaishankar tells Bihar the Ganga treaty will not be renewed over the state’s head

S. Jaishankar has told Janata Dal (United) that any decision on the 1996 Ganga Water Treaty with Bangladesh will be taken with Bihar interests in view. The letter, dated 28 August, replied to a Rajya Sabha Special Mention by Sanjay Kumar Jha on 6 August. Indian papers carried the text on 2 and 3 September, as the Ganga at Patna ran high enough that residents were crossing by boat.

The treaty, signed on 12 December 1996, governs dry-season flow at the Farakka barrage from January to May. It lapses on 12 December 2026, though some briefs use 31 December as the political end date. Shares move with the measured flow. Jha, a former Bihar water resources minister and now JD(U) national working president, told the House that lean-season releases toward Bangladesh leave the state short of drinking water, irrigation and industrial supply.

What the letter actually commits

Jaishankar wrote that the government fully understands the concerns. He said the Jal Shakti Ministry has already run inter-ministerial consultations and that an authorised Bihar representative sat in meetings on 22 August 2023, 30 October 2023, 15 March 2024 and 31 May 2024. The government, he added, will take the appropriate decision while keeping those factors in focus.

That is not a promise to scrap the treaty. It is a promise that Bihar is on the file. Jha called the reply a moment of satisfaction and said Nitish Kumar has raised the same point since his first term as chief minister. He also said Bihar is not asking for a favour. The scientific assessment, in his telling, is that 13 crore people should not be locked into another 30-year lean-season shortfall.

People familiar with the MEA brief told Hindustan Times that drinking-water and industrial needs are now part of the renewal test. Renewal itself remains one of the larger items on this year India-Bangladesh calendar.

Why Farakka is a Bihar argument

Farakka sits in West Bengal. The politics of the water sit upstream in Bihar and downstream in Bangladesh. When the dry-season gauge falls, every extra cusec that leaves the Indian bank is a cusec that does not sit in a Bihar canal. When the monsoon gauge rises, as it did this week in Patna, the same river is a flood. Both facts can be true in the same year. The treaty only writes rules for the first one.

Bangladesh will treat any Indian delay as a political act. Bihar will treat any quiet renewal as a political act. Jaishankar letter splits the difference by naming the state without naming a volume. The next number that matters is the dry-season flow table that Jal Shakti puts, or does not put, into a draft text before December.