INDO NEPAL BONE OF CONTENTION

Indo-Nepal bone of contention

The new regime in Kathmandu is spitting fire over the calamity caused by the Kosi floods following a breach in its embankment. Nepal has termed the 1954 Kosi Treaty with India as a “blunder” and is going to push India for its review for amendments.

Nepal’s perspectives on its water relations with India are partly rooted in what it sees as the unsatisfactory outcome of past engagements. These relate to the Sarada river agreement of 1920 and the Kosi and Gandak agreements of 1954 and 1959.

In each case, Nepal feels aggrieved by the far larger water use by India as compared to the more limited area it has been able to irrigate. On the other hand, Indian experts point out that “this is obviously a fact of geography…Nepal’s mountainous landscape limits its arable and irrigable area as compared with India’s vast and sprawling Ganga plains.”

While New Delhi maintains that “any sense of hurt on this score is misplaced,” it appears that Maoist regime now playing in the erstwhile Himalayan kingdom is going to spit more fire over trans-boundary river treaties, especially the one related to the Kosi.

The real problem is that the institutional arrangements for implementing several Indo-Nepal treaties, agreements and understandings are weak. Over 14 joint committees exist to manage, develop and implement cooperation between India and Nepal in the field of water resources. But the outcome of these committees has not been satisfactory.By looking at the number of joint committees formed earlier, it seems that whenever problems emerge the existing committees are keen to form another committee to look after the issues without trying to solve them. Performances of many of these committees are never monitored. Some of these committees have not met since their formation while others meet infrequently.

Since the beginning of the last century, India and Nepal have entered into several treaties on the trans-boundary Rivers to share benefits from the rivers. They include: the Sarada Agreement (1920) on the Mahakali river; the Kosi Project Agreement (1954); and the Gandak Project and Power Agreement.

The Kosi Project Agreement was signed on April 25, 1954, to control the floods and to prevent free oscillation of the river over time. It was revised on December 19, 1966 following the Nepalese people’s protests.

The agreement allowed India to construct at its own cost a pair of embankments to confine the Kosi river in its course, and a barrage across the river in Nepal close to the international border. Construction works were completed in 1959 and 1963 respectively. The Kosi barrage also provides irrigation water to Bihar through eastern and western main canals.

The salient features of the Kosi agreement are: Nepal has every right to withdraw water from the Kosi river and its tributaries for irrigation and other purposes in Nepal; India has the right to regulate the balance in the Kosi river at the barrage site for irrigation and to generate hydropower from the eastern main canal.

The Kosi Project Agreement of 1954, subsequently revised in 1966, “made no provision for irrigation in Nepal from the project.” However, agreements and understandings through an exchange of letters made the following provisions:

An understanding reached in 1971 allowed Nepal to withdraw 400 cusecs of water from the western main canal to irrigate about 25,000 ha of land in Nepal, through a project called the Western Kosi Canal Project, which was developed by India at its own cost; and an additional agreement between India and Nepal as of April 7, 1978, made provision for the renovation and extension of irrigation facilities developed earlier in Nepal. India met the entire cost.

Recently, India and Nepal agreed that the investigations of the Kosi multipurpose project be undertaken jointly. It includes a Kosi dam in Nepal upstream of the Kosi barrage near Barakshetra, as a long-term measure to augment the lean season flow for irrigation, to control floods with specific flood cushion in the reservoir and for power generation.

The multipurpose project also includes trans-basin transfer of water from the Sun Koshi to the Kamala river in Nepal for irrigation development in both the countries. A navigation canal access from the Kosi high dam, along the left bank, up to the Ganga, is also being considered, which could provide navigation access to the sea to the land locked Nepal and north India. Experts believe that it could also benefit Bangladesh as it could provide the much-needed augmentation of lean season flow in the Ganga at Farakka and also flood control benefits.

The outstanding issue in this case is that India wants to develop this project with a concept of providing a “flood cushion in the Kosi high dam to provide flood relief to Bihar.” Nepal wants to maximise its own benefits from the project. Nepal is keen on developing the Sun Koshi-Kamala diversion independent of the Kosi high dam, while India thinks that both the Kosi high dam and the Sun Koshi-Kamala diversion be taken up together.

India is also interested in the Kamala dam project in addition to the Sun Koshi trans-basin diversion into the Kamala. But Nepal has raised some environmental problems with this dam.

Between 1960 and the mid-1990s, several multipurpose water resource projects were studied in Nepal for their joint development with India. These included the Kosi river project. Despite several levels of talks and negotiations, further cooperation between New Delhi and Kathmandu in the field of water resources did not materialise till the signing of the Mahakali Treaty in 1996. Though part of the reason, says experts, may have been political, an important factor was the “lack of mutual trust” between the two nations in resolving several issues.

( Source: The Tribune)