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Bangladesh-India JRC meeting not held

The foreign minister says the postponement has no link with the NRC


Published : 19 Dec 2019 09:39 PM | Updated : 07 Sep 2020 12:36 PM

The Bangladesh and India Joint Rivers Commission (JRC) meeting, which was scheduled for Thursday in New Delhi for updating data on six common rivers, has been postponed.

The meeting was deferred amid the unrest in India over the National Register of Citizenship (NRC) exercise. Bangladesh foreign minister AK Abdul Momen, however, told reporters that there is no link between the JRC postponement and the NRC.

“We deferred the meeting through a consensus,” he said, “We postponed it as we believed more data on the six rivers need to be collected”. He said the fresh date of the meeting will be set when both sides become ready with full and correct data. 

“It (new date) depends on our homework … the meeting won’t be productive without correct data,” he said after a meeting in Dhaka on Wednesday afternoon. The six common rivers include the Muhuri, Monu, Dharla, Khowai, Gumti, and Dudhkumar. With the postponement of the JRC, the issue of updating data of those rivers is now delayed further. Officials said last time the data was updated 34 years ago. Earlier in August this year, a meeting at the water secretary level in Dhaka decided to update the data of those rivers.

The relations between India and Bangladesh are now said to be at their best, despite challenges in water-sharing issues. Both countries have 54 common rivers with only one, Ganges water, being shared through an agreement since 1996.

Teesta river water-sharing deal was postponed just hours before it was to be signed during the then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit in September 2011 due to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s opposition.

Since then, India has been maintaining that it will ink the deal once it gets approval from the state government. The JRC is a bilateral working group established by India and Bangladesh in the Indo-Bangla Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Peace that was signed on March 19, 1972 and came into being in November, 1972.

The last JRC, the 37th meeting, was held in March 2010 ahead of Manmohan Singh’s visit.