What Went Wrong? - The Ganga: Water Use in the Indian Subcontinent - page 219

the Ganga will not remain static but in all probability, go down. It was unfortunate
that the technical experts of India's Ministry of Water Resources and West Bengal
government's irrigation and waterways directorate, who were associated with the
Treaty either did not foresee these eventualities, or their views were not sought, or
given due consideration.
Calculation of average discharge for 40 years (1949-1988) should be based on
the maximum and minimum discharges of a number of years. If the figures for the
minimum are for 15 years in a span of 40 years, the situation can recur in the next
30 years, i.e., the period of the Treaty. The discharges will drastically go, in three
decades, much below those, stipulated in the Annexure-II. How would water-sharing
materialise in those years of scarcity? Will the shares of India and Bangladesh be
reduced and will these reductions be proportionate? The Treaty did not clarify this,
but it specifically provided that the share of Bangladesh would never go below 80%
of the quantity, as laid down in the Annexure. To keep Bangladesh unaffected in such
crises, India would have to suffer and sacrifice her interests. For instance, if the flow
at Farakka falls to 40,000 cusecs, India will get less than 10,000 cusecs as long as
it lasts. In fact, on a day in 1980, the minimum discharge did come down to about
38,000 cusecs. Since 1976, on a day each in nine years- 1980, 1983-1985, 1988,
1992-1994 and 1997; the minimum discharges were less than 45,000 cusecs. The
sharing formula in Annexure-II would have been difficult to apply in those years;
there was no guideline in the Treaty. Such days are bound to recur in future and
perhaps more often, as upper riparian States would continue to draw more water for
diverse purposes. Though the Treaty provides for mutual consultation in the event
of the flow at Farakka going below 50,000 cusecs in any 10-day period, it would
have been better if an automatic response by the two sides was incorporated in it,
because by the time, they consult each other, the climax of fallen discharge might
have passed and some harm had been done. In fact, this happened in April 1997,
four months after the Treaty came into effect. The flow at Farakka went down to
about 46,000 cusecs, landing field engineers in a spin for release of water from the
barrage. As stated, whenever one side got 35,000 cusecs in a 10-day period, the
other side was to get only about 11,000 cusecs. The treaty gave no guarantee that
a similar situation would not arise in future. The Ganga is an alluvial river; its bed
and banks below the barrage and the feeder canal are made of very fine silt, silty
clay, sand and sandy silt deposits with little shearing resistance to sudden changes
in external forces. The soil is loose, porous, non-uniform and heterogeneous, owing
to uneven level between the river and the ground-waters inside the bank-soil mass.
Water may either moist the soil mass, or exit non-uniformly and damage the soil.
This helps erosion of banks and the bed and causes bank-slips, which are frequent
in the tidal reach where water-level always changes and fluctuates. In the Hooghly,
this occurs twice a day, with flow and ebb tides.
In Annexure-II, the discharges in the Ganga and the feeder canal are shown as
fluctuating in March and April. The flow in the canal reduces to the minimum from
one 10-day period to the next to 6,820 cusecs from 21-31 March to 1-10 April and
that in the Ganga reduces to 7,366 cusecs from April 1-10 to April 11-20. Thus, the
total flow during this period of March 21 to April 20 varies from 64,688 to 62,633