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natural resources, he added.

Tanmay Sanyal, coordinator of Rajshahi unit of Bela, presented the keynote paper and said Barind Multipurpose Development Authority began extracting groundwater in 1985.

BMDA has so far installed some 15,553 deep tube-wells by which it withdraws 2583.62 million cubic metres of groundwater annually to irrigate at least 5.25 lakh hectares of farmland. Now the private users of deep tube-wells have doubled than that of BMDA, the paper said.

Referring to a Department of Public Health Engineering report, the keynote said groundwater table in Dinajpur has been declining by three to 4.5 metres in every 10 years. Groundwater in the district was available at 6.26 metres in 1985, while the level went down to 41 metres in 2019.

It said the annual rainfall in Barind region is 44 percent lesser than the country’s total rainfall.