The river will outlive maps: Teesta’s journey through geopolitics, myth and memory
The Teesta is running dry. But its crisis is more than a story of climate change or a failed water-sharing agreement
The boat lies on its side like the skeleton of some beached leviathan, its wooden ribs bleached grey by the sun, which no longer finds clouds to hide behind. Alal Uddin rests a calloused hand on the hull. He does not look at the river, because where the river should be, there is a desert.
The Teesta, at the confluence with the Dharla in Kurigram, has become a vast, melancholic plain of sand.
In the dying light, the chars — those ephemeral islands born of silt and current — stretch to the horizon, shimmering with heat even as the evening cools. A motorcycle buzzes across the riverbed where he once cast his nets. The sound is obscene.
"Listen," Alal Uddin says, not in my direction but into the dry wind.
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I listen. There is the distant, asthmatic cough of a diesel pump, sucking at the last of the groundwater to irrigate a field of maize. There is the cry of a child from a village that has watched its men leave for Dhaka, for Delhi, for anywhere the land is not turning to powder. But the sound he wants me to hear is absent. It is the sound of a river that was once a god.
In the old tongues, trishna means thirst. Today, the word feels inseparable from the Teesta herself. The goddess who once sustained kingdoms is now disappearing into sand. Thirst consumes thirst.
This is not a death from natural circumstances. It is a death enacted by policy, by the high, cold arithmetic of geopolitics and a warming world that is unmaking the icy source from which she springs.
The Teesta River, all 414 kilometres of her, is a case study in a planetary crisis, but here, on the sand, she is simply a mother who can no longer feed her children. To understand how we arrived at this desiccation, and to imagine a path back to life, we must travel upstream, into the clouds, into the concrete, and into the memory of the river herself.
A lake on the verge of tears
High in the Himalayas, above the tree line, where the air is thin and the prayer flags have been whipped to rags by a perpetual wind, lies a body of water that should not exist. South Lhonak Lake, cradled in a cirque of ice and black rock in North Sikkim, is a child of the Anthropocene.
For millennia, the glacier held its meltwater in frozen stasis. But the planet's creeping fever has turned ice to water with terrifying velocity. The lake swelled, a liquid bomb held back by a fragile, frozen moraine.
On the night of 3 October 2023, the moraine could hold no more. Fifty billion litres of water — a volume almost beyond human comprehension — burst forth, a churning grey mass of liquid and debris that scoured the Teesta Valley down to its Precambrian bones. It erased the Chungthang dam, a concrete monument to India's hydropower ambitions, as though it were a child's sandcastle.
It displaced 80,000 people, killed more than a hundred, with bodies swept into Bangladesh across an international border that meant nothing to the raging water. The Indian state of Sikkim was cut in half.
In that cataclysmic night, the river spoke a truth that all our treaties and technocratic jargon cannot obscure: she is a single, indivisible living system. The political maps we overlay on her body are fictions she can dissolve in an hour.
This is the first framework we must grasp, one written not by theorists but by the river's own physics.
The glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) was not simply a "natural disaster". It was a symptom of a deep structural instability — the collapse of the Holocene's climatic stability that allowed human civilisation to draw lines on a map and call one side "India" and the other "Bangladesh". The Anthropocene is a rupture, and the river is the agent of this revelation. She will not be bordered.
A story of division written in concrete
If the source holds the memory of the river's untamed power, the Gajoldoba Barrage in West Bengal is where her body is first truly broken. Here, downstream from the mountains, the Teesta's flow is captured, measured and divided.
The structure is a brutalist monument to the logic of the nation-state: a grey line of concrete gates that transforms a living current into a resource to be allocated. The water diverted here does not reach Bangladesh; it is sent into the Mahananda canal system to quench the thirst of rice paddies in Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar.
It is easy, in Dhaka or Delhi, to speak of the 2011 draft Teesta agreement — which proposed a 42.5% share of dry-season flows for India and 37.5% for Bangladesh — as a failed promise, a victim of one woman's political intransigence.
Mamata Banerjee, the former chief minister of West Bengal, did indeed walk away from the deal, citing an unacceptable risk to her farmers. But to see this only as obstruction is to miss the deeper tragedy.
On the ground in North Bengal, the fear is visceral. The groundwater here is laced with arsenic. The Teesta's surface flow is not a luxury; it is a lifeline in a landscape of silent poisoning. When Mamata Banerjee says she cannot give a "drop of water" to Bangladesh, she is performing for a domestic constituency whose anxiety is real and historically rooted.
This is the bitter logic of what scholars of transboundary water politics call hydro-hegemony. As the upstream riparian, India's position on the Teesta is not just geographical; it is a structural power that sets the terms of reality. It controls the data. It builds the dams. It determines the timing and volume of the flow that crosses the border.
For a downstream nation like Bangladesh, the river arrives not as a gift of nature, but as the residual flow of an upstream neighbour's calculations.
The 2011 agreement died in the space between Delhi's diplomatic signalling and Kolkata's democratic compulsions — a chasm called federalism. Any durable solution must navigate not just the international border but the internal, emotional borders of India's water-stressed states. The barrage is a monument to this gridlock, and every day it stands in silent operation, the river downstream grows fainter.
Downstream in a river of sand
Back in Bangladesh, at Kaunia, a market town in Rangpur Division, the riverbed is now a thoroughfare for motorbikes, rickshaws and the occasional hopeful-looking goat. The transformation has not been gradual.
Old men who have spent their lives by the Teesta speak of a flow that has collapsed within their lifetime, from around 6,710 cusecs in the 1990s to a meagre 200–300 cusecs during the dry months.
It is a hydrological death by a thousand cuts, the combined effect of upstream diversion and a shifting climate that starves the river of its glacial melt just as the monsoon becomes more violent and erratic.
This is the dialectic of climate change: drought in the lean season, devastating floods during the monsoon. In 2022, a sudden flood eroded 8–10 kilometres of riverbank, swallowing homes, while months later the same communities were pumping diesel to coax water from a sandy ditch.
The human cost of this pattern is measured in numbers too vast to feel—1.5 million tonnes of lost rice production annually, a figure projected to rise by 14% by 2050; more than 111,000 hectares of irrigable land in northern Bangladesh facing chronic water shortages.
But the true cost is measured in the slow, quiet unravelling of a culture. The boatmen become rickshaw pullers. The farmers become migrants in Dhaka's slums. The women who once sang of the river's bounty now walk farther each day to fetch drinking water. A civilisation built on the rhythm of the river's flood pulse is losing its metronome.
This is where the language of law, so often sterile, finds its moral force. The 1997 UN Watercourses Convention, which neither India nor Bangladesh has ratified, enshrines the principles of "equitable and reasonable utilisation" and the obligation "not to cause significant harm".
Standing on the sands of Kaunia, the concept of significant harm is not an abstract legal threshold. It is the taste of dust in the wind. It is the silent engine of the diesel pump burning through a family's savings.
The Chinese proposal
Into this vacuum of despair and diplomatic paralysis, a new power has stepped forward, offering a tangible, concrete and profoundly controversial solution. Frustrated by the deadlock with India, Bangladesh partnered with China in 2016 to develop the $1 billion Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project.
The TRCMRP, as it is known in policy briefs, is an engineer's dream of command and control: dredge 140 million cubic metres of sediment, construct 124 kilometres of embankments, and build reservoirs to capture and store the monsoon's excess for the dry season's thirst.
To many in Bangladesh, this is a lifeline. China's state-owned enterprises are offering speed, financing and a refreshing absence of the historical baggage that shadows the relationship with India.
But there is a quieter voice of caution, emerging not from geopolitics but from the science of the river itself. Fluvial geomorphologists warn that the Teesta is a braided, alluvial river, an extraordinarily complex and dynamic system whose bed consists largely of sand. To dredge it is not a one-off fix; it is a declaration of war against the river's natural sediment transport.
The Gajoldoba Barrage in West Bengal is where the Teesta's body is first truly broken. Here, downstream from the mountains, the Teesta's flow is captured, measured and divided. The structure is a brutalist monument to the logic of the nation-state: a grey line of concrete gates that transforms a living current into a resource to be allocated.
The river will refill the dredged channel. Meanwhile, the hardened embankments, intended to stop erosion, will transfer the river's energy downstream, causing new and unexpected devastation in the very communities the project is meant to protect.
This is the same ecological trap seen on the Yangtze and countless other rivers: the technocratic fantasy of forcing a river into a straitjacket inevitably fails, and the poorest bear the cost of that failure.
This introduces a critical nuance into the geopolitical tussle. The TRCMRP is not simply an Indian or Chinese strategic play; it is an ecological gamble. It offers a version of resilience that is centralised, infrastructure-heavy and vulnerable to the very GLOF-scale disasters that are becoming more frequent. The debate is not just about who builds the project, but about the very paradigm of river management it embodies.
Lessons from a wider world
The Teesta is not alone in her crisis. She is a tributary in a global story, and in other river basins different futures have been imagined. The Mekong River Commission, flawed and incomplete without China's full membership, has nevertheless established a framework for prior consultation on dams and, critically, a data-sharing platform that sends flood warnings directly to fishermen's mobile phones.
Imagine a Teesta fisherman receiving a text message with the reservoir release schedule from an upstream dam in Sikkim. That is not a diplomatic fantasy; it is a technical reality that exists 1,500 kilometres east of here.
Further west, the Senegal River Basin Development Authority offers a more radical blueprint. Mali, Mauritania, Senegal and Guinea jointly own infrastructure such as the Manantali Dam. Its 800 gigawatt-hours of electricity are not a gift from upstream to downstream, but a shared dividend. The infrastructure transforms the zero-sum game of water allocation into a positive-sum game of joint energy and food production.
Then there is the road not yet taken: Nepal. Sitting on the headwaters of rivers that flow into the Ganga and Brahmaputra systems, Nepal possesses vast, untapped hydropower potential. A concrete, bankable proposal has circulated among energy economists for years: a trilateral power–water swap. Nepal, with financial support, would construct storage hydropower projects. During the dry season, it would release water from its reservoirs into the river system, which would naturally flow through India to Bangladesh.
In return, it would export the generated clean electricity to Bangladesh via an Indian transmission corridor. India, for its part, would provide transit and earn wheeling charges. This is the alchemy of multilateralism: transforming the object of conflict — water — into a product of cooperation — energy — and shifting the discourse from a bitter bilateral division of scarcity to a regional creation of abundance.
A river's rights
Yet all these models, however innovative, still treat the river as an object of human management. There is a deeper philosophical revolution stirring in the world's legal and cultural imagination. In 2017, the High Court of Uttarakhand in India declared the Ganga and Yamuna rivers to be legal persons, with all the attendant rights, duties and liabilities.
The ruling was legally messy and remains mired in implementation, but its symbolic power was immense. It echoed New Zealand's Te Awa Tupua Act, which granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River — an act of law born from the long struggle of the Māori people, for whom the river is an ancestor.
On the Teesta, this is not a foreign import. The goddess Trishna is already a person in the cosmology of the communities that live along her banks. In Sikkim, she is the consort of the Rangit, and her waters are sacred. In the dying chars of Bangladesh, a Hindu woman still offers a lamp and flowers at the water's edge, an act of devotion to a spirit whose body is vanishing.
What if the proposed International Teesta Basin Commission were not simply a forum for state representatives, but also reserved a seat for the river herself, represented by custodians from those communities — fishermen, farmers and priests who have lived and died by her pulse? This would not be a poetic gesture. It would be a profound act of Earth jurisprudence, compelling a legal and political system to recognise that the river's right to flow is not contingent upon its utility to a nation-state, but is intrinsic to its very being. It recentres the entire debate from the politics of sovereignty to the ethics of reciprocity.
The river remembers
The monsoon will come. It always does. When I return to the Dharla–Teesta confluence in another season, the moonscape of sand will be submerged beneath a churning, ochre expanse that smells of earth and sky. The river will reclaim her bed, eroding a fresh, jagged bank, swallowing a field of maize and threatening a village that has dared to live too close to her memory.
She will be terrifying and generative, a destroyer and a life-giver. The same people who begged for a cup of water in April will flee to higher ground in August. This is not a contradiction; it is the fundamental, untameable nature of a Himalayan river.
The Teesta will outlive the maps. She will outlive the barrages and the embankments, treaties and billion-dollar dredging projects. Empires decay. Pragmatism survives. The river's memory is deeper than our politics. She remembers the path to the sea.
Our task, in this era of climate collapse, is not to conquer her or carve her up. It is to enter into a relationship of intelligent, humble reciprocity. A multilateral commission, founded on real-time data, equitable energy swaps and a legal mandate that recognises the river as a stakeholder, is the highest and most pragmatic expression of that relationship.
It is not merely a diplomatic solution to a water conflict. It is a civilisational pact between two nations — and between humanity and the living world — that the thirst of one will not be quenched by the desiccation of another.
The time for bold action was yesterday. We are already late. But as the sun sets over the sandbed where the water should be, we can still hear her whisper: the ghost of a current, the memory of a goddess named for thirst. She is waiting for us to remember that we are not her masters, but her children.
Zakir Kibria is a Bangladeshi writer, policy analyst and entrepreneur based in Kathmandu, Nepal. His can be reached at zakir.kibria@gmail.com.
