Teesta agreement still at assurance level: Shahriar

India has again assured Bangladesh of resolving the issue of Teesta water sharing, State Minister for Foreign Affairs Md Shahriar Alam said on Tuesday.

“We are still at the assurance level. We believe that the commitment that India gave us will be delivered, though it may take time,” he said.

The state minister said this at a press briefing held at Bangladesh House here after bilateral talks between visiting Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Indian counterpart Narendra Modi.

He, however, said that the big achievement of this tour of the PM Hasina has been the agreement on the withdrawal of water from bordering Kushiyara River by Bangladesh.

This was among the seven MoUs signed between the two countries on the second day of Hasina’s four-day official visit to India on Tuesday.

Successive Indian prime ministers, Narendra Modi and Manmohan Singh, continued promising to conclude the interim agreements on sharing waters of seven trans-boundary rivers, the Teesta in particular, in spite of requests from Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on almost every occasion they met.

After the finalisation of the draft of the Teesta deal by the two sides, India backtracked on signing the treaty just hours before the arrival of Manmohan Singh in Dhaka on September 6, 2011 on the plea that West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee objected to the agreement.

According to the framework of an interim agreement finalised in 2010, the two sides agreed to share Teesta water on a fair and equitable basis with the 50:50 water-sharing ratio keeping 20 per cent of the water as environmental flow during the lean season.

India, however, sought to sign an interim agreement on Feni water sharing before signing the Teesta deal.

Bangladesh was seeking signing the two interim instruments together.