A low dam girdles the Ganga about sixty miles beyond Bhagalpur. More than a mile and a half across, the structure is the longest barrage in the world. It has 109 gates, almost twice as many as the Koshi barrage I traveled over near the Nepal-India border. Its name, Farakka, is anathema to people throughout Bangladesh. In India mainly fishermen on the Ganga know much about it. The barrage, which sits just eleven miles from the international border that separates the tiny nation from its big neighbor, has poisoned relations between the two governments for forty years. The story of Farakka is one of the thorniest river disputes on the subcontinent. Whole books have been written about it on both sides of the border as well as by international commentators, not to mention the technical treatises it has engendered. The barrage did not accomplish the task for which it was built and has harmed people in both India and Bangladesh. Farakka offers a warning about how not to handle transboundary rivers to prevent complex subcontinental watersharing problems from becoming crises in the future. Borders fragment the river system in the Ganges basin, creating unique transboundary water management challenges. To visualize the Indian subcontinent’s river-sharing problems, imagine a slice of pizza. Take a bite out of the middle of the bumpy top crust. That’s Nepal. Then take a small bite out of the right, or eastern edge, just below the crust. That’s Bangladesh. The rest of the slice is India. These three nations share the greater Ganges basin. The river spills into the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh after flowing across the wide top part of India. Many of the river’s major tributaries come from Nepal. The smaller slice of pizza to the west would include Pakistan and the Indus River, but that’s another complicated story. Now move the piece of pizza to North America and pretend the United States is the majority of the slice.
Are Cultural and Economic Conservatism Positively Correlated? A Large-Scale Cross-National Test
