West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee upset with PM Modi over water sharing talks exclusion

NEW DELHI: In what seems like a repeat of history after 10 years, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee is unhappy with Prime Minister Narendra Modi for keeping her out of water sharing talks that he had with Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina during their bilateral exchange here on Saturday.
It was Banerjee who came in the way of the Manmohan Singh government’s Teesta river water sharing deal in 2013, for the same reason that the Centre did not involve the West Bengal government for sharing its waters with Bangladesh.The deal is still pending and has been a bone of contenstion between the two neighbouring countries.
On Saturday Modi and Hasina have decided to start negotiations on the renewal of the 1996 Ganga Water Sharing Treaty that ends in 2026. But yet again the Centre seems to have begun talks for a renewal of the treaty without keeping the Bengal government in the loop. Modi on Saturday has announced that India and Bangladesh will begin technical-level talks for the renewal of the 1996 Ganga water treaty, and also that an Indian technical team will visit Bangladesh soon for the conservation and management of the Teesta river.
Since Bengal is the crucial stakeholder on the Indian side when it comes to shared waters with Banglaldesh, as the rivers flow out of West Bengal into Bangladesh, Banerjee has taken it as an affront that the Centre did not consult her before deciding on waters that belong to the people of the state of West Bengal. According to Trinamool Congress parliamentary party leader Derek O’Brien told the media on Sunday that “the state is party to the treaty but not consulted.”
According to sources, Banerjee is likely to write a letter to Prime Minister Modi, flagging the concern that not only is it an anti-federal move to leave the stakeholder state out of the negotiations, it is also depriving the people of Bengal from their say in sharing the waters that flow out of their state.
The TMC MPs are planning to raise this issue in the coming Parliament session and the TMC leadership is in talks with the INDIA bloc of opposition parties to take up the issue in a big way.
O’Brien alleged, “Dredging of the Ganga has been stopped. It is the primary reason for floods and erosion. This is a plan to sell off Bengal.”
Banerjee had written to PM Modi in February 2022, on the land erosion issue on the banks of Ganga that majorly affected Malda, Murshidabad and Nadia districts of Bengal. In the letter she mentioned that after the Farakka Barrage was built erosion has bcome more rampant leading to severe loss of public property and agricultural land and sought reconsideration of the Centre’s decision in 2017 to withdraw the extended jurisdiction of the Farakka Barrage Project Authority (FBPA) for protection of the river bank from further erosion.