20/08/2026
🚨 HOW CONGRESS & UNITED FRONT SOLD BIHAR & INDIA’S INTEREST FOR 30 YEARS VIA A TREACHEROUS 1996 GANGA TREATY
The 1996 Indo-Bangladesh Ganga Water Treaty is not some “friendly neighbourly gesture.” It is a deliberate sell-out of Bihar’s water, Bihar’s soil, Bihar’s future – engineered by the United Front government with Congress’s full blessings. And now, as the 30-year deadline approaches, the same lobby wants to quietly renew it again.
Let’s call out the traitors by name.
In December 1996, when Bihar’s rights over the Ganga were surrendered at Farakka, Lalu Prasad Yadav was sitting at the very heart of the United Front government. Congress president was supporting that government from outside. And Sitaram Kesri, a Bihari himself, stayed completely silent while his own state’s interests were butchered. This was the purest form of the Gujral Doctrine - India, the “big brother,” must give unilateral concessions to neighbours without expecting a single drop of reciprocity. The entire bill was dumped on one state: Bihar.
What did this treaty actually do?
At Farakka, when the river flow is 70,000 cusecs or less, water is split 50:50, with 35,000 cusecs guaranteed to each side in alternating 10-day periods from 11 March to 10 May. Sounds fair? It is a cruel joke. That volume of water does not even exist when the Ganga enters Bihar.
At Buxar, the lean-season flow is barely 14,000 cusecs. The water that finally reaches Farakka is generated almost entirely within Bihar’s own 445 km stretch. So one single state – Bihar – is forced to underwrite an international commitment while being denied its ordinary riparian rights.
The Farakka barrage itself, commissioned in 1975 to keep Kolkata Port navigable, has turned into a silt trap. Silt that once flowed to the sea now settles upstream. The Ganga’s *aviralta* (uninterrupted natural flow) is broken. The river bed is rising across Bihar. Water that once stayed in the channel now floods villages. Then the same river turns around and starves us in the lean season. Groundwater is collapsing not only in south Bihar’s drought districts but also in flood-prone Darbhanga and Madhubani. Reservoir storage has averaged a pathetic 35% of capacity over five years.
Nitish Kumar has been shouting this truth for two decades. The data now proves him right.
Bihar did everything the Centre asked. It assessed its requirement till 2050 and placed a demand for 2,000 cusecs before the government committee. The final report gave them only 900 cusecs – less than half – and excluded irrigation completely, with zero published reasoning for the cut. If this system can halve Bihar’s claim so casually, how will renewal of this treaty ever honour it?
This treaty has served India poorly on every front:
- 30-year lock-in with no meaningful exit clause
- Zero reciprocal guarantee from Bangladesh
- Nothing on the Teesta
- Nothing on the wider basin
- Dhaka today openly links the entire bilateral relationship to renewal of this one-sided pact – that is pure leverage against us
The hydrology itself has changed. The 1996 formula rests on flow records from the middle of the last century – before Himalayan glacial retreat and the collapse of dry-season predictability. Committing another 30 years to that outdated arithmetic in a climate-altered basin is pure negligence dressed up as continuity.
There is a deeper principle at stake. India has never scientifically apportioned the Ganga among the states that feed it – Uttarakhand, UP, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal. There is no settled inter-state allocation. How can a nation responsibly commit abroad what it has not first allocated at home? To renew this treaty before fixing that is to repeat the crime of 1996 at even greater cost.
Bihar of 2026 is not the Bihar of 1996. Then they had roughly 7.3 crore people. Today they have more than 13 crore. Yet their water entitlement remains frozen in time.
Let us be crystal clear: Letting the treaty expire on 12 December 2026 is NOT hostility towards Bangladesh. It is not abandonment of water sharing. It is simply the end of a fixed-term contract that has already bled Bihar dry. India must let it die and negotiate afresh – this time after a scientific allocation among basin states, using current hydrological data instead of 1950s records, with shorter review cycles, a real exit clause, and a minimum of 2,000 cusecs for Bihar’s drinking water, irrigation and industry. The National Silt Management Policy must also be notified without delay.
In 1996, Bihar was not even in the room. The country was told that generosity abroad would somehow be its own reward. Thirty years of data have exposed that lie. A treaty that floods one state in July and parches it in April, binds the Union to arithmetic older than most of its citizens, and purchases zero reciprocity, cannot be renewed by default.
Congress and the United Front sold Bihar then.
They must not be allowed to sell Bihar again.
This time Bihar will be in the room.
This time India will negotiate from knowledge and from strength.
Let the 1996 Ganga Treaty lapse.
Let justice finally flow.
