Falling Water Table Leaves Chapainawabganj's Barind Short of Irrigation and Drinking Water

The groundwater table in the Barind area of Chapainawabganj was falling fast in early March 2026, leaving farmers short of irrigation water and residents short of safe drinking water, Jagonews24 reported from the district on 7 March 2026. The yearly fall was causing most concern in Sadar, Nachole and Gomastapur upazilas, and people involved in farming and water management said it had raised new fears for future food production.

Farming in the Barind depends mainly on groundwater. According to the report, years of heavy use of deep tubewells for irrigation, irregular rainfall and the loss of reservoirs and canals were hampering natural recharge, so the water table kept sinking, with direct effects on crop production and on people's daily lives.

The report appeared a few months after the government, in a gazette notification reported in October 2025, declared parts of Rajshahi, Chapainawabganj and Naogaon districts water-stressed areas for ten years. It also followed many years of research by Bangladeshi scientists and water agencies showing the same downward trend across the high Barind.

Local farmers told Jagonews24 that a few years earlier water could be found at a shallow depth. By March 2026, they said, even tubewells sunk very deep did not give enough water, so irrigation cost far more than before. On top of the extra fuel needed to run irrigation pumps, the cost of sinking new deep tubewells was also rising, and production costs had multiplied.

The shortage of safe water had also become acute. Tubewells were no longer drawing water, the report said, so people had to fetch water every day from distant deep tubewells, and some were forced to buy water from other sources. That put pressure on their time, their labour and their money alike.

Abdul Jabbar, a resident of Hosendanga in Sadar upazila, said water once came easily from the tubewell next to the house. Now, he said, people often went round several tubewells and still found none, so they had to collect it from a deep tubewell. Women and children, he said, suffered the most.

Researchers have described the same pattern. A 2021 paper in the journal Applied Water Science, by a researcher at BMDA and two colleagues at Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology, said that shallow tube wells and hand pumps in the Barind were no longer working as the water level fell, and that high-head force-mode pumps installed to reach deeper water had raised the cost of both drinking water and irrigation. Many people, the paper said, had to collect drinking water from distant places, and some used contaminated pond water for household needs and suffered waterborne diseases.

The two kinds of well are built differently. Banglapedia describes a shallow tubewell as about 5 to 10 centimetres across, with a centrifugal pump, and a deep tubewell as about 15 to 20 centimetres across, with a submersible turbine pump. It notes that irrigation wells are called deep because of their pump and capacity, not necessarily because of their depth. As far back as 2016, a study of the region said the water level had already dropped below shallow wells in many places.

Shafikul Islam, a rice farmer in Nachole upazila, said he had grown up growing rice, and that rice had been the main crop. Now, he said, it had become very hard to grow for lack of water, and irrigation cost a lot more, so on the agriculture department's advice he had had to cut back. If the crisis kept growing, he added, many farmers would be forced to give up rice, which could lower their incomes and affect food production.

To tackle the crisis, the report said, the agriculture department was encouraging farmers to limit rice and grow rabi (dry winter season) crops that need less water. Dr Md Yasin Ali, deputy director of the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) in Chapainawabganj, said farmers were being urged to grow alternative crops to ease the pressure on water in the Barind, and were being advised on expanding wheat, maize, pulses, sesame and other rabi crops.

The water figures explain that advice. The Daily Star reported in April 2021 that, by an estimate of the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute, about 3,000 litres of water go into each kilogram of Boro rice, the irrigated dry-season crop, while wheat and maize need roughly 400 to 600 litres. The same report said groundwater supplied 75 percent of the water needed for rice irrigation in Bangladesh.

Boro matters nationally as well. The Financial Express reported in November 2025 that about 60 percent of the country's rice comes from the Boro season, mostly grown in the north. In that report, Nachole's upazila agriculture officer said Boro output there had fallen by 35 percent that season, and blamed inadequate irrigation caused by falling groundwater. The report also quoted a senior manager at BRAC saying that farmers in the region were moving from rice to mango, which reduced the demand for farm labour.

Heat adds to the strain on the crop. A DAE official in Rajshahi told The Daily Star in November 2025 that temperatures start to rise there in March, and that Boro pollination is badly disrupted when they pass 35 degrees Celsius.

A teacher named Iman Hossain told Jagonews24 that the soil of the Barind is relatively hard and the natural flow of water is limited, so heavy extraction makes the water table fall quickly. If effective steps were not taken at once, he said, crop production in the region could be badly damaged.

Published research supports his description. Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia, describes the Barind Tract as the largest Pleistocene physiographic unit of the Bengal Basin, about 7,770 square kilometres between the Karatoya in the east, the Mahananda in the west and the Ganges in the south. It is floored by Madhupur or Barind Clay, a reddish-brown, sticky and fairly compact deposit, and Banglapedia calls the area drought-prone and semi-arid.

The 2021 Applied Water Science paper gave the numbers. The top layer of clay is more than 15 metres thick across almost all of the area it studied, with an infiltration capacity of only 2 to 3 millimetres a day. Bore logs in Nachole, Tanore, Niamatpur and Godagari showed clay running from the surface down to the aquifer for between 19.81 and 30.48 metres. Because the tract is flood-free and no river flows through it, the paper said, storm water is the only source of recharge, and that water cannot percolate easily.

Rain is also scarcer here than elsewhere. The paper put annual rainfall at between 1,250 and 2,000 millimetres, with almost 80 percent falling from June to October. Its table for 2002 to 2017 gave an average of 1,340.56 millimetres for four Barind upazilas, against a national average of about 2,500 millimetres. Nachole itself ranged from 2,029 millimetres in 2007 to just 742 millimetres in 2012, and it recorded a shortfall against its own average in ten of those 16 years. The paper listed moderate to extreme droughts in the region in 1972, 1975, 1979, 1982, 1986, 1989, 1992, 1994, 2003, 2005, 2009 and 2010.

Rainfall records show a decline as well. A study by the Bangladesh Meteorological Department covering 1980 to 2023, reported by The Daily Star in November 2025, found rainfall in Rajshahi division falling by 54 millimetres a decade.

According to those involved, Jagonews24 reported, about 900 millimetres of water is stored underground through rain in the Barind each year, while crop production needs about 1,300 millimetres, and this gap between demand and supply was making the crisis worse by the day. The report did not name the source of those two figures. Modelling by the Institute of Water Modelling (IWM), cited in the 2021 paper, gave a lower figure for potential recharge: 496 millimetres in Nachole, 521 in Godagari, 451 in Niamatpur and 357 in Tanore.

Chapainawabganj is a border district of 1,702.55 square kilometres with five upazilas: Sadar, Gomastapur, Nachole, Bholahat and Shibganj. Banglapedia lists the Padma, the Mahananda and the Pagla as its rivers, and records a population of 1,647,521. The Mahananda enters Bangladesh through Bholahat and runs about 36 kilometres inside the country, passing Chapainawabganj town before joining the Ganges at Godagari.

The three upazilas named in the report are largely rural. Banglapedia gives agriculture as the source of 73.27 percent of incomes in Nachole, which covers 283.67 square kilometres and has a population of 146,627; 62.45 percent in Gomastapur, with 318.13 square kilometres and 275,823 people; and 44.97 percent in Sadar, with 451.78 square kilometres and 530,592 people. Paddy leads the crop lists of all three, and tube-wells supplied the drinking water of 90.6 percent of dwellings in Gomastapur and 81.6 percent of households in Sadar.

Water reserves in these upazilas are thin. A study by IWM for the Water Resources Planning Organisation (WARPO), reported by The Daily Star in July 2023, found that Nachole and parts of Chapainawabganj Sadar and Gomastapur, along with Badhair union in Tanore, have only one thin aquifer, six to 16 metres thick, at a depth of 426 metres. It was the only source of water there. The Daily Star reported separately in 2021 that Nachole and Gomastapur are among the higher parts of the region, more than 47 metres above sea level.

Long-term records show the trend. A study in the journal Sustainable Water Resources Management, published in 2016, analysed Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB) data from 73 observation wells in 25 upazilas of Rajshahi, Chapainawabganj and Naogaon for 1991 to 2009. It found the strongest falls in the central part, covering the Barind, at rates of 0.2 to 0.82 metres a year in the dry season and 0.2 to 0.67 metres a year during the monsoon. The authors blamed heavy abstraction for irrigation, falling rainfall and the area's surface geology, and warned that the situation would become irreversible if steps were not taken.

The IWM study for WARPO gave a longer view. In 1985 and 1990, the water table stood at about 8 metres below the surface in most of the area, with some spots at 21 metres in Gomastapur and Tanore. By 2010 the average depth had passed 15 metres, and by 2021 it had reached 18 metres across a wider area. At Gomastapur in Chapainawabganj it reached 46.87 metres in 2021.

The study classed 87 of the region's 214 unions as areas of very high or high water stress. Among the hardest hit were the whole of Porsha and Nachole upazilas, and Gomastapur was among the nine upazilas with further very high stress unions. The Dhaka Tribune reported similar figures in feet in December 2025: about 26 feet in 1985 to 1990, 50 feet by 2010 and 60 feet by 2021, with many areas then deeper than 113 feet.

Nachole's own record shows the same. The Daily Star reported in April 2021 that the upazila recorded the region's lowest level in February 2018, at 107 feet, more than 28 feet below the 78.8 feet of 2005, and that levels dropped to about 130 feet at the end of the irrigation season. Nationally, a BWDB study of 2022, based on data from 465 shallow observation wells for 1970 to 2020, found groundwater declining in at least 38 districts because of heavy dry-season extraction, The Daily Star reported in November 2025.

The Barind's dependence on groundwater is about four decades old. The Barind Integrated Area Development Project began in 1985 under the Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation, and on 15 June 1992 it was reconstituted as the Barind Multipurpose Development Authority (BMDA) under the Ministry of Agriculture. The Daily Star described the region as largely barren in the mid-1980s; deep tubewells in the 1990s then made three crops a year possible.

A 2018 note from Australia's science agency CSIRO, which worked with BMDA, said the authority had installed more than 11,000 deep tubewells since 1985 and reactivated about 4,000, for a total of about 15,000 in operation, and that BMDA metered extraction through a prepaid card, so that farmers bought the volume they needed at each crop stage. CSIRO put the land suitable for agriculture in the Barind at about 532,000 hectares. The Dhaka Tribune reported in December 2025 that BMDA ran about 18,000 deep tubewells across Rajshahi and Rangpur divisions.

Private wells have taken a large share of the water. The Daily Star reported in 2021 that BMDA stopped installing new deep tubewells in 2012 and turned to surface water while private tubewells kept spreading, and that about 70 percent of the region's annual extraction of 13,710 million cubic metres came from unregulated private deep tubewells.

BMDA told Jagonews24 that it was meeting water demand in many areas through deep tubewells, and that it had also started work on excavating rivers and canals, re-excavating reservoirs and water conservation projects. Md Al Mamunur Rashid, the authority's executive engineer in Chapainawabganj, said various steps were being taken to reduce dependence on groundwater, alongside work to raise awareness of the proper use of water.

The scale of that surface water work was set out in the 2021 paper, using BMDA data from 2018. There were about 2,000 kilometres of re-excavated kharies, or canals, with 749 cross dams to hold back storm water, and 3,098 re-excavated ponds across the Barind. BMDA had also built about 240 dug wells that store rainwater collected on solar panel structures, with solar pumps watering low-water crops such as cauliflower, potato and chillies. Separately, the Financial Express and the Dhaka Tribune reported in late 2025 that BMDA was drawing water from the Mahananda by a double-lifting system to ease the pressure on aquifers.

Trials have also tried to push water back underground, a method known as managed aquifer recharge. BMDA built a recharge well on the bed of the Sharmangla canal in Godagari in 2013; it clogged with clay during the monsoon, and a modified design with a water-control structure followed in 2016. A rooftop rainwater scheme was built at BMDA's Mohanpur office the same year. The paper said both recharged groundwater and that the water stayed within drinking standards, but that the muddy storm water, the thick clay and the lack of practical knowledge remained major challenges.

The government had acted on the problem before Jagonews24's report. In late August 2025, a meeting of the executive committee of the National Water Resources Council identified 47 unions, covering 1,503 villages, in 25 upazilas of the north-west as facing acute water scarcity under the Water Act of 2013, bdnews24.com reported.

UNB reported on 30 October 2025 that a gazette notification from the Ministry of Water Resources had classed 47 unions in 25 upazilas of Rajshahi, Chapainawabganj and Naogaon as extremely high water-stressed, 40 as high and 66 as medium. BSS reported in December 2025 that the declaration covered 4,911 villages for ten years, and the Dhaka Tribune put 1,469 mouzas in the extremely high group, 884 in the high group and 1,240 in the moderate group. Among the directives UNB listed for these areas were:

• No new tube wells, and a ban on extracting groundwater for anything other than drinking.
• No new industry or institution that depends on groundwater.
• Canals, beels, ponds and rivers may not be reclassified and must stay open for public use.
• Highly water-dependent crops are to be discouraged or limited, and water-saving crops promoted in phases.
• Further steps may be taken to ensure safe drinking water and enough water for household use.

Jagonews24's report closed on what it said lasting water management would require: conserving rainwater, restoring rivers and canals, cutting waste and shifting toward crops that need less water. Without that, it said, the shortage could grow into a larger crisis for farming and life in the Barind. The IWM study had recommended much the same in 2023: combining groundwater with surface water, excavating reservoirs and re-excavating beels and ponds, moving away from water-hungry Boro rice in the worst-hit areas, and recharging aquifers artificially.

Photo: Mahbubcsedu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). The top picture shows the Mahananda and the fields on its bank, seen from the Captain Jahangir Bridge in Chapainawabganj, as background.

Sources: Jagonews24, The Daily Star, The Financial Express, Dhaka Tribune, bdnews24.com, UNB, BSS, Banglapedia, Applied Water Science (Hossain, Bari and Miah, 2021), Sustainable Water Resources Management (Rahman and others, 2016), CSIRO, Wikipedia.