May 15 occupies a charged place in Bangladesh’s political memory. The date is observed as “Farakka Day”, commemorating the 1976 long march led by Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani protesting India’s diversion of Ganges water through the Farakka Barrage. Nearly half a century later, the symbolism remains painfully current.
Bangladesh’s latest mega project — the US$2.8 billion Padma Barrage approved this week by the Executive Committee of the National Economic Council — is in many ways a delayed answer to the same unresolved question that animated Bhashani’s march: how can a downstream country survive when the tap upstream is controlled elsewhere?
The government has framed the barrage as an engineering solution to an ecological problem. Built at Pangsha in Rajbari district of Bangladesh, the structure is intended to retain monsoon water from the Padma River and redistribute it during the dry season, when vast parts of southwestern Bangladesh turn increasingly saline and water-starved.
Officials say the barrage will hold nearly 2,900 million cubic meters of water, revive at least five major river systems, improve irrigation across 28.8 lakh hectares of farmland, support fisheries and navigation, recharge groundwater and strengthen freshwater flows into the Sundarbans.
The project is colossal even by Bangladesh’s infrastructure standards. At more than $2.8 billion for its first phase alone — with eventual costs potentially crossing $4 billion — it instantly joins the ranks of the country’s most ambitious public works.
Yet the deeper significance of the barrage lies in geopolitics. It is a tacit admission that Dhaka no longer believes diplomacy alone can guarantee sufficient water from India.
That anxiety is sharpened by the calendar. The 1996 Ganges Water Sharing Treaty between Bangladesh and India expires in December 2026, only months away. Signed after years of acrimony, the treaty regulates dry-season water sharing at Farakka between January and May — precisely when Bangladesh suffers its harshest shortages.
The agreement was once hailed as a breakthrough in regional water diplomacy. Yet in Bangladesh, dissatisfaction with its outcomes has steadily grown.
