Official sources told The Daily Star yesterday that India recently indicated that the JRC would meet in Delhi sometime in September. The last JRC meeting took place in January 2002 in Dhaka.

"The dates are being worked out now," a top official said. But he declined to give details.

Earlier this month, Water Resources Minister Hafiz Uddin Ahmad had said, "My predecessor (in the ministry) LK Siddiqui sent a letter to India for early convening of the JRC meeting, but no response came by. After assuming office, I too wrote calling for immediate holding of the JRC meeting but to no avail."

JRC Member Dr Tawhidul Anwar Khan noted that though it was mandated to meet at least three times a year, not a single meeting was convened since the last one in January 2002 due to India's reluctance.

Sources said Bangladesh will take up at the coming meet the issue of India's $200 billion river inter-linking project, which is designed to divert water from major international rivers including the Ganges and the Brahmaputra to drought-prone Indian states.

Bangladesh depends on these two rivers for 85 per cent of its dry season surface water supplies. But India is going ahead unilaterally with this project without any talks with its lower riparian neighbour and has formed a taskforce headed by former minister Suresh Prabhu to finalise a report on it. It is trying for foreign funds.

Dhaka sent a protest note to Delhi on August 13 in this regard.

In an interview with the Kolkata daily The Statesman recently, Suresh Prabhu said, "The foreign ministry is handling some of the work. I will speak with Yashwant Sinha (external affairs minister) to discuss issues with neighbouring countries like Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh."

Officials in Dhaka said Bangladesh has already brought to the notice of international financing agencies how badly the river-linking project is going to affect it environmentally, ecologically and agriculturally.

The project, envisaged by the National Water Development Agency (NWDA) of India and to be implemented in 10 years, involves building hundreds of reservoirs and digging more than 600 miles of canals. For this, the Indian government is going to seek international funds.

British daily The Guardian said on July 24 India plans to divert vast quantities of water from major rivers, including the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, threatening the livelihood of more than 100 million people downstream in Bangladesh.

Up to one third of the flow of the Brahmaputra and other rivers could be diverted to southern Indian rivers to provide 173 billion cubic metres of water a year, supplying millions of people in Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka states with more reliable drinking and irrigation water, The Guardian said.

Indian daily The Hindu in an editorial on August 6 said, "A number of states, from Punjab in the north to Kerala in the south, have expressed their opposition to a transfer of river waters from their territory to other states. The latest example is the considerable anxiety in Kerala about including a link between the Pampa and the Achankovil (flowing through Kerala) and the Vaippar (in Tamil Nadu) in the proposed national river grid."

Meanwhile, after the signing of the Ganges water-sharing treaty with India in 1996, expectations ran high that the two neighbouring countries would gradually move forward to signing similar treaties on sharing of 54 other common rivers. The last JRC meet took up the issue of water-sharing of the Teesta but it ended inconclusively. The coming meeting, officials hope, would take up water-sharing of seven common rivers -- Teesta, Dharla, Dudhkumar, Khowai, Monu, Gumti and Muhuri.

Talking to The Daily Star yesterday, water resources expert Dr Ainun Nishat said the catchment areas of the Brahmaputra that originated in Tibet are spread over four countries -- China, India, Bangladesh and Bhutan.

"While China is planning to build dam in Tibet to divert Brahmaputra water to drought-prone central China regions, India is going to divert water from its part of Brahmaputra too. In the process, flows to Bangladesh and Bhutan would dry up," observed Nishat, a former professor at the Bangladesh Universiry of Engineering and Technology.

Dr Nishat, now country representative of the International Union of Conservation of Nature (ICUN), felt that the four co-riparian countries should sit together and work out plans so that the Brahmaputra serves all of them in the best possible way, doing injustice to none.