[ALOCHONA] Tipai team to return without visiting site

Tipai team to return without visiting site
Nazrul Islam

Courtesy New Age 3/8/09

 

Bangladesh’s delegation returns home today from India abandoning its planned field trip to Tipaimukh project site after heavy rains failed its attempt twice.
   The 10-member team left Guwahati, from where it tried to reach the site by helicopter on Friday and Sunday, for New Delhi with a hope to visit the project site in India’s Manipur state sometime in dry season, officials who are in constant touch with the team told New Age Sunday.
   Former water resources minister Abdur Razzak led the delegation that left Dhaka for New Delhi on July 29 to talk to Indian officials and have a close look at the Tipaimukh dam site amid uproar against the planned Indian structures on the cross border river Barak that flows into Bangladesh rivers Surma and Kushiyara.
   The delegation members held talks in Delhi but failed to reach Tipaimukh because of inclement weather in the hilly terrain, according to officials.
   On return, the delegation would decide whether it will visit again in the dry season or send an expert group to assess the impacts of the Indian planned multi-purpose dam on downstream Bangladesh.
   ‘The dialogue will continue at different levels,’ said one official adding that the delegation members will have a meeting tomorrow to analyse the data they have collected on the dam during the visit.
   The team, comprising six lawmakers from ruling Awami League and Jatiya Party, three officials and one academic, is learnt to have proposed a similar visit to the dam project in November.
   Lawmakers of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami refused to accompany the team, saying that such a trip would be a ‘picnic party’ without adequate presence of experts.
   Choosing monsoon period was perhaps a wrong decision, the delegation chief Abdur Razzak told BBC in Guwahati.
   The delegation during its stay in New Delhi held talks with Indian power minister Sushil Kumar Shinde and officials concerned. Bangladesh proposed a joint impact study on the project. But no clear signal was given from the Indian side as yet.
   The Indian authorities only said that they would not take any scheme harmful for Bangladesh — an assurance given by Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh to prime minister Sheikh Hasina during a meeting on the sidelines of NAM summit in Egypt last month.
   The project is a hydro-electric one and there is no possibility of diverting water from the common river, they said.
   Environmentalists fear that the Indian project on the Barak river would restrict flow to the Meghna river and cause negative impacts on the ecology of the Sylhet region.
   Leader of the opposition and former prime minister Khaleda Zia, in a letter last month, requested the Indian prime minister to drop the project.
   The $1.7 billion project, cleared by the Manipur government, is awaiting approval by the Indian cabinet committee concerned. India says the project is designed to produce 1,500 megawatts of hydroelectricity.

 

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