We will solve Tipaimukh issue through talks with India: Hasina

DHAKA - Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has expressed confidence over resolving the controversy over the Tipaimukh dam project in India’s northeast through talks with New Delhi.

She reminded parliament Monday that she had resolved the dispute over the Ganga water by signing a bilateral treaty with India during her earlier tenure in 1997.

She promised to include representatives of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) which, she said, was wanting to send a separate team to study the project.

“Do they want to solve the problem or to create an issue?” she asked of opposition leader Begum Khaleda Zia who had a few hours earlier sent a letter asking for ‘help’ to send a separate team to India.

Zia actually seized on an offer made last week by Hasina, while not wanting her lawmakers to be included on the team of members of parliament’s standing committee on water resources.

Demanding that the experts be ‘neutral’, Zia nominated one expert and three former officials who had dealt with water resources in the past.

“If the leader of the opposition (Khaleda Zia) wants to include names (from her party) in the delegation (to visit Tipaimukh), they will certainly go,” the prime minister told the parliament.

She did not disclose the contents of the letter, New Age newspaper said. But the BNP had made the contents public Monday in which Zia had wanted a separate team.

The proposal for a parliamentary team with experts to visit the site and study the project came from India last month following Bangladesh’s protests.

Opposition parties have joined sections of environmentalists and NGOs who say the project on Barak river in India’s Manipur state endangers lower riparian Bangladesh’s ecology, while denying it its share of river water.

The issue has acquired political overtones with the BNP and the ruling Awami League leaders exchanging words daily and engaging in a blame-game.

“I would become happy if I found their loud voice against the Tipaimukh dam when they were in power,” Hasina told parliament.

India is proposing to construct a dam at Tipaimukh that is at the confluence of Barak and Tuivai rivers, some 200 km upstream of Bangladesh’s north-eastern border.

It will also construct a dam at Phulertal, which is 100 km downstream from Tipaimukh.

The twin interventions on the trans-boundary river Barak will have multifarious adverse impacts on the people, their livelihoods and nature in the north-eastern districts of the two countries, New Age cited experts as saying.