Water Governance, Environmental Security and Human Well-being

This present work argues that the present national level institutional structures—like the Brahmaputra Board or the proposed Brahmaputra River Valley Authority—will be inadequate to address present and future challenges. The authors recommend that a better institutional response to the management challenges to promote IRBM in the Brahmaputra sub-basin will be the setting up of a transboundary river basin organisation, considering the lower Brahmaputra for the time being. The lower Brahmaputra sub-basin, in this context, has been delineated by the area within the Brahmaputra sub-basin that falls within the political boundaries of Bhutan, Bangladesh and India. In the initial stages of institutional development, the inclusion of YarlungTsangpo upto the point where it enters India, draining the dry region in the Tibetan Plateau, is deemed to not be of immediate utility for the purposes of this report.