Sustainable Management Options for Healthy Rivers in South Asia: The Case of Brahmaputra

Abstract

The Brahmaputra is one of the largest river systems of South Asia, providing life-supporting services to about 70 million people. Massive flooding, land erosion, over-exploitation of water, excessive fishing, habitat degradation and fragmentation, exploitation of flood plains, climate change impacts, absence of integrated basin wide management, and transboundary cooperation are major challenges for the present and future sustainability and development in the basin. Although hydrological connectivity is intact in most of the main course of the river, the infrastructure development plans may convert the Brahmaputra to a predominantly managed river system. In this regard, this paper examines the physiographic, ecological, hydrological, and socioeconomic status of the Brahmaputra river, its transnational basin in South Asia, and the basin population in the cross-cutting context to explore its sustainable management options. For a durable future of the river and its communities, an integrated management mechanism among the basin countries with the objective of equitable benefit sharing, disaster risk management, and resilience building is needed. The suggested strategies will help in maintaining the ecohydrological health and utilitarian services of the river for the socioeconomic development of millions of poor and marginalized people living in the basin.

Characterization and assessment of flood inundated areas of lower Brahmaputra River Basin using multitemporal Synthetic Aperture Radar data: A case study from NE India

“…The Brahmaputra River Basin is one of the world's most significant and most populated basins of the Hindu Kush Himalaya, with a 528,083 km 2 transboundary drainage area (Bajracharya & Shrestha, 2011;Wester, Mishra, Mukherji, & Shrestha, 2019). The Brahmaputra River originates from the Chemayungdung glacier of the Kailash range of the Himalayas in the south of Tibet at an elevation of 5,150 m (Mirza, Warrick, Ericksen, & Kenny, 2001;Pradhan, Das, Gupta, & Shrestha, 2021). The Brahmaputra River traverses in China for 1,625 km, 918 km in India and 337 km in Bangladesh and merges into the Bay of Bengal as the Meghna River of Bangladesh (Pradhan et al, 2021).…”

“…The Brahmaputra River originates from the Chemayungdung glacier of the Kailash range of the Himalayas in the south of Tibet at an elevation of 5,150 m (Mirza, Warrick, Ericksen, & Kenny, 2001;Pradhan, Das, Gupta, & Shrestha, 2021). The Brahmaputra River traverses in China for 1,625 km, 918 km in India and 337 km in Bangladesh and merges into the Bay of Bengal as the Meghna River of Bangladesh (Pradhan et al, 2021). The Brahmaputra Basin shares 50.5% of its basin area with China, 33.6% with India, 8.1% with Bangladesh and 7.8% with Bhutan (Rasul, 2015).…”

Geomorphological processes and their connectivity in hillslope, fluvial, and coastal areas in Bangladesh: A review

“…Apart from natural processes, the Brahmaputra-Jamuna river is continuously facing various anthropogenic stressors like frequent land-use change, channelization, and regulations of normal river flow (Gupta et al 2019) (i.e., Teesta barrage at its upstream, Jamuna multipurpose bridge, etc. ), which emphasizes the implementation of sustainable solutions (Pradhan et al 2021). For instance, the present site of the Jamuna multipurpose bridge was selected based on the geomorphological study conducted by Oya (1979).…”

Coalition and contradiction in managing Brahmaputra: Opportunities for more hydropower?

“…Managing the Brahmaputra requires su cient negotiations and sophisticated plans to effectively allocate water (Pradhan et al, 2021), share timely data (He, 2021b), address scarcity (Liu, 2015) and manage ethnic and territorial con icts (Davis et al, 2021) (Table 1). Trust-building among the four nation-states, especially between China and India, has always been regarded as the key to effective cooperation (Biba, 2020;He, 2021b;Pradhan et al, 2021). However, with the impacts of climate change, trust may be challenged and some riparian states have refused to comply with the treaty clauses and have manipulated data in order to extract more water (Qamar et al, 2019).…”