Dhaka team returns to Delhi after second Tipai landing attempt fails

A Bangladesh parliamentary delegation, now visiting India, on Saturday returned to New Delhi from the Assam state capital of Guwahati as rough weather prevented it from flying to the site of the controversial Tipaimukh dam project on the cross-boundary river Barak, officials said.
‘The members of the delegation returned to New Delhi from Guwahati [Saturday] afternoon after failing to fly to the project site by helicopter for the second consecutive day,’ an official at the parliament secretariat told New Age.
The 10-member delegation, led by former water resources minister Abdur Razzak, first tried to visit the dam site on Friday by helicopter.
But the chopper failed to land on the remote hilly area in the Indian state of Manipur because of bad weather.
The team, now on a five-day visit to India, made a second attempt on Saturday to land in the area, but the helicopter returned to Guwahati after hovering over the area for a few minutes in windy and cloudy conditions, according to state-run Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha news agency.
The head of the delegation told the news agency that from the helicopter they saw no trace of structures at the proposed dam site.
The team members are scheduled to visit the shrine of Khwaza Mainuddin Chishti at Ajmer before they return home on Monday.
The team, comprising lawmakers of the ruling Awami League and Jatiya Party, and a water expert and three officials, left Dhaka on July 29 to hold talks with Indian officials and visit the dam site.
Environmentalists in Bangladesh fear the dam, if constructed upstream, could cause desertification in north-eastern Bangladesh.
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.
Failing to reach the site, the delegation chief Abdur Razzak, also chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on the ministry of water resources, told BBC in Guwahati that he might have chosen a wrong time to visit the place.
He opted for another visit in future to assess the probable impact of the dam on Bangladesh.
The delegation during its stay in New Delhi held talks with Indian power minister Sushil Kumar Shinde and officials concerned.
Indian authorities reportedly assured Bangladesh that they would do nothing that could harm the region downstream. They said the dam was designed to produce 1,500 megawatts of hydro-electricity, not for irrigation.
The dam site is located in India’s north-eastern state of Manipur, some 200 kilometres upstream of Sylhet district’s border.
The trans-boundary Barak river feeds Bangladesh’s Surma and Kushiyara river system that drains waters down to the Bay of Bengal through the Meghna, one of the country’s major rivers.
The Bangladeshi team suggested a joint survey of the project by experts from both the countries.
Bangladesh’s opposition leader and former prime minister Khaleda Zia, in a letter to Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh last month, requested him to drop the project.
The $1.7 billion project, cleared by the Manipur government, is awaiting approval by the cabinet committee on economic affairs of the Indian government.

Courtesy of NewAgebd