Rethinking water treaties

THE 1996 Ganges Water Sharing Treaty (GWT) between India and Bangladesh was never designed to last forever. Its architects knew this. They gave it a 30-year term, assuming that three decades would be sufficient for the two countries to develop the trust, the data, and the institutional maturity to negotiate something better. That deadline falls in December 2026. The negotiations now underway suggest that not one of these goals has been achieved. The climate crisis has made the stakes considerably higher than anyone imagined in 1996.