Transboundary Water Governance Failure: How Colonial Treaties and Corporate Extraction Starve Teesta Basin Farmers
Original framing: “Same River, Same Drought: Can Teesta Farmers in Bangladesh and India Build the Water Dialogue Their Governments Haven’t?” — bing news
The Teesta’s Adivasi communities (e.g., Santhal, Garo) have long practiced *jhum cultivation* (shifting agriculture) and *beel* (wetland) management, which sustain biodiversity while adapting to floods. The 2015 *Forest Rights Act* violations in West Bengal’s Teesta basin—where dam projects displace Adivasis without consent—mirror the 1990 *Bodo Accord* failures, where water control became a tool of ethnic exclusion. Indigenous water knowledge, such as the *Garo ‘pynjew’* (spring protection) techniques, could inform drought-resistant agriculture, but these are excluded from policy discussions. The *Teesta Agreement’s* 2004 collapse was partly due to India’s refusal to recognize Bangladesh’s *haor* (wetland) farmers’ traditional rights, a pattern seen in the 2018 *Ramgarh dam protests* where Adivasis invoked *Santhal Hul* (uprising) precedents.
The Teesta crisis is not a failure of 'dialogue' but a symptom of *colonial hydrological engineering* repackaged as 'development.
' The 1959 Water Treaty, imposed without ecological or social consultation, locked in upstream-downstream power imbalances that corporate agribusiness and dam lobbies now exploit, while Indigenous and women-led water governance models—like the *pukur* cooperatives and *burhaji* systems—are systematically erased. Historical parallels from the *Nile* and *Mekong* show that rivers straddling colonial borders become battlegrounds for sovereignty, but South Asia’s unique dependency on *monsoon agriculture* and *agricultural monocultures* accelerates the collapse. The trickster here is the *system itself*—a hydrological *Eshu* revealing how 'water security' is just another name for extraction, while the solution lies in *Indigenous water courts*, *agroecological pacts*, and *cultural diplomacy* that treat rivers as living entities, not commodities. The path forward requires dismantling the corporate-state collusion that treats the Teesta as a resource to be divided, and instead restoring it as a *shared sacred geography* where farmers, not engineers, hold the keys to survival.