An Indian researcher has said that some two million people in the Khulna region bf Bangladesh have been displaced as a direct consequence of the Farakka barrage.

Ashok Swain, a Research Fellow at the Uppsala University of Sweden, told The Daily Star’that most of the population of the- Khulna and Kushtia districts, as well as Rajshahi, have been forced to leave‘their homes because of the economic hardships due to water diversion by the Farakka barrage.

Swain is working on a study under the Department of Peace and Conflict Research on the Ganges water sharing dispute between India and Bangladesh.

Swain came to Bangladesh last month n connection with his on-going research work which is being-funded by the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries (SAREC).

Ph. D. holder on the security of small states from the Jawaharlal Nehru University at Delhi, Swain joined the Department of Peace and Conflict Research of the Uppsala University in 1991.

He said he plans to specialise in conflict resolution research.

Quoting preliminary findings

By Masud Hasan Khan of his study, the 28-year-old researcher said the Farakka barrage has. hit hard the small farmers in particular and made them landless, thereby kicking off a disastrous "eco-migratlon" from the region.

The Farakka barrage, only 18 kilometres from the Bangladesh border, is located in the West Bengal state of India. Commissioned on April 21. 1975, the 40.000 cuaecs-capac-ity barrage was built for maintaining the navigability of the Calcutta port by diverting waters from the Ganges to the

Bhagirathi-Hooghly rivers.

The Bangladesh government charges that the country's economy and environment have been seriously affected due to the adverse impact of water withdrawal by India at Farakka.

Pointing out-the absence of any agreement between the two countries for sharing the Ganges waters at present. Swain said Farakka was the most irritating factor in the Indo-Bangladesh relations.

Although the nature of the dispute Is still 'no-armed' in character.yet it has seriously strained relations between the neighbours over the past two decades, he said.

An excellent relationship, founded with India’s assistance to the independence struggle of Bangladesh,, promptly eroded within three to four years mainly because of the Farakka barrage, the researcher pointed out.

The way Bangladesh is being pushed into institutionalising the Farakka Issue at various fora would eventually go against the strategic interest of India in the near future.

"India should now consider whether its national interest is rightly served by Farakka or not." observed the articulate researcher from the Indian state

of Orissa.

An earlier case study by Swain, on the environmental destruction caused by the Farakka barrage and the subsequent acute social conflict, surmised that the impact of the barrage on the country’s agricultural production, partlcu larly during the dry season, has been "calamitous"

The diversion of the Ganges flow in the upstream had also reduced Bangladesh s capacity to irrigate its own land and at the same time worked against the planning of non-irrigated crops which depend upon the residual moisture of the soil, that study found.

The study also revealed that the Farakka barrage has:

* delayed planting of crops and shortened the growing sea son:

* limited Bangladesh's irrigation capacity to only 23 per cent of the total arable land:

* caused salinity Intrusion up to 460 kilometres inside the country;

★ handicapped the industrial and domestic fresh water supply in the Khulna region:

* damaged the Khulna Newsprint Mills and the thermal power station at Goalpara:

* threatened the existence of the Sundarbans -- the world's largest littoral deltaic forest, with an estimated timber loss worth US dollar 20 million annually:

* sharply reduced capture fisheries: and

* shrunk the country's wa terways to 5,000 km from the pre-Farakka 25.000 km of navigable inland water routes.