Abu Bakar Siddique
Dhaka Tribune
December 4, 2014
The JRC formed in 1972 has failed to deliver excepting the Ganges Water Sharing Treaty though its focus was on the management of the ecosystem of the entire Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin.
Joint Rivers Commission (JRC), formed to maintain liaison between countries that share the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin, to ensure common river management, is lagging far behind from its mandate, say speakers.
“The JRC formed in 1972 has failed to deliver excepting the Ganges Water Sharing Treaty though its focus was on the management of the ecosystem of the entire Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin,” said CM Shafi Sami, former foreign secretary of Bangladesh.
He said this while taking part a discussion titled Ecosystems, People and Shared Learning: Experience from Bangladesh-India Civil Society Dialogue, held yesterday at city’s Amari Hotel.
He raised the question about two separate JRCs in Bangladesh and India saying that as the ecosystem is same two JRCs are unnecessary.
Mir Sajjad Hossian, former member of the JRC, Bangladesh, echoed the same view and said the JRCs had never taken any initiative on basin-wise water management rather it had focused on water-sharing of some specific rivers between Bangladesh and India.
He termed it unfortunate.
He cited an example of Sundarbans ecosystem which lies between both the countries. “The two countries can easily initiate joint effort to save the world’s largest mangrove ecosystem.”
The discussion was organised by International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Bangladesh under its Ecosystems for Life project where around 80 experts from both Bangladesh and India are participating.
However, Water Resources Minister Anisul Islam Mahmud blamed the political unwillingness of the countries in the region as the reason for failure of such a platform.
He said the countries of the region are sharing a common ecosystem but none of them know what others are doing on their individual part and even they are not interested to share the information.
The conception that the Tipaimukh dam will turn Sylhet region of Bangladesh into a perennial flood zone was proved to be wrong, said the minister.
The countries concerned should sit across the table more and more based on scientific data and information to save the common ecosystem, otherwise each of them will have to suffer, he said while addressing the two-day-long discussion as a chief guest.
Echoing the same view Prof CK Varshney, the professor emeritus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, said ecosystem-based management had never got importance which may spell disaster for the region’s agriculture and water sectors.
