The slow death of Ghaghat: Blocked at source, choked in the city 

Standing by the shallow Ghaghat River, Mohammad Funu Mia, 70, a farmer living near Nisbetaganj Ghat in Rangpur, remembered the river as he once knew it. 

"There used to be fish here as big as a person. You would be frightened just seeing them. Boal, Rui, Mrigel — so many kinds. Fish from the Teesta would come here, lay eggs and reproduce," he recalled. 

The Ghaghat, now nearly dead, was not always like this. For Funu Mia and those who remember the river in its better days, it was once deep and swift, stretching 236 kilometres from its source in Jaldhaka, Nilphamari, south through Rangpur before meeting the Brahmaputra at Balashighat in Gaibandha.

The river is ancient. People knew its fearsome moods, but they lived by it too, making it part of their everyday lives, livelihoods, rituals, and beliefs. Funu Mia remembers the traditional boat races, as well as people being swept away by its current. And the same river carried water to the fields, fish to the villages, and life along its banks.

Today, that sounds almost like a myth.

"We once used to pump water directly from the river to our fields using shallow pumps. Now, we draw groundwater instead. It is costly," Funu Mia shared his memories of farming by the Ghaghat. 

Beyond livelihood, the river was also an important source of food; for the people living along its banks. But that has changed.

"There is no water, so how will the fish come? We do get fish during the floods, though. But only we, the poor people, eat them and get diseases." 

As Funu Mia spoke, wastewater was being discharged into the river through a nearby drain. Just a few metres away, fishermen were casting their nets into the same shallow water. Among them was Idu Mia, 50. A few small fish wriggled in his net.

Unlike Funu Mia, Idu still spoke of the river with some hope.

In the past, people could travel by boat through the Ghaghat to reach Rangpur. That waterway connection is now gone. In many places, sandbars have formed along the river, narrowing it further. 

"I mostly catch Tengra and Puti. Boal, Magur, all those fish are still there," Idu said. "But they usually appear only when the river swells during the floods."

Idu has been fishing the Ghaghat for more than 30 years. He regretted what the river had become.

"Teesta's water can't enter anymore. So our Ghaghat's current has weakened. Now, there are not even a quarter as many fish as there used to be," he added.

The change was visible in the water. The river barely moved. Near the drain, wastewater trickled into the sluggish current. Looking at it, Idu pointed to two sources of the pollution: wastewater from the municipality and effluent discharged by factories near CO Bazar. 

"When they release chemical water, fish die and float to the surface. We all come and catch them then, but most of those fish cannot be eaten," he said.

Locals pointed to the embankment between the Teesta and the Ghaghat as one of the reasons for the river's decline. They say it cut the Ghaghat off from its source river, weakening the flow downstream and leaving wastewater to linger instead of being carried away.

When the Ghaghat lost its source

The embankment was built as a flood-control measure. According to Tuhin Wadud, director of Riverine People, the Teesta protection embankment in Nilphamari was constructed by the Water Development Board at a time when farmers generally grew only one crop a year. 

The idea was to protect those crops from flooding. Water from the Teesta could also enter the Ghaghat during periods of high flow, causing floods in the surrounding areas, he said.

The Ghaghat has long been known for its devastating floods and riverbank erosion. But protecting the land from floods also meant changing how the river moved. Over time, the flood-control embankment itself became part of the problem. 

"In building the embankment, they blocked the river's source. This was highly unscientific, and it has caused a great deal of long-term damage," added Tuhin, also a professor of Bangla at Begum Rokeya University in Rangpur.

Safiar Rahman, general secretary of the Tista Bachao, Nodi Bachao Songram Parishad — an activist coalition that has long fought for the restoration of the Teesta and its tributaries — blamed the same embankment. It was built for flood control, he said, but in the process, the Ghaghat lost its direct connection to the Teesta at its head. 

The government later dug a canal connecting the Auliakhana river to the Ghaghat, Safiar Rahman informed, but that was no substitute. Auliakhana itself is a dried-up river, with no significant upstream source — leaving the Ghaghat, too, waiting for the sky.

The consequences went beyond the Ghaghat itself. Once the river was cut off, Safiar added, other rivers and channels connected to it — including the Burail and the Makha — were also affected. Tuhin similarly pointed to the decline of other Teesta rivers, saying that the embankments built along the Teesta and its branch rivers had disrupted their connections. Along with the Ghaghat, rivers such as the Alai, the Manas and the Buri Teesta were also drying up, he said.

The Tista Bachao, Nodi Bachao Songram Parishad has long been demanding a comprehensive plan for the Teesta that includes fully restoring the river's former connections with its branches and sub-branches, as well as resuming navigation along those waterways. Until then, fixing any one river in isolation — whether through dredging, renovation or beautification — is little more than a temporary fix. 

As the Ghaghat loses its flow, so does the lung of Rangpur city

Perhaps the clearest example of a temporary fix is the Shamasundori Canal, a 16-kilometre waterway once known as the lungs of Rangpur city. Today, it is a dumping ground, its foul smell lingering along the canal as people pass by.

"Fix the Ghaghat, and Shamasundori fixes itself," both Tuhin and Safiar said.

The connection between the two is historical. The Shamasundori was cut directly from the Ghaghat in 1890, following the path the river once took through the city. Locals and old records alike have long called it the Puran [old] Ghaghat. 

Raja Janaki Ballav Sen of Dimla ordered its excavation in memory of his mother, Shamasundori Devi, to drain the stagnant water that had turned Rangpur into a breeding ground for malaria. The canal was once between 40 and 120 feet wide, fed by the Ghaghat's flow, and it worked.

More than a century later, the same canal has become a source of the very problems it was built to solve. Coming near it is an assault on the senses — the water has turned black, stagnant and foul-smelling. The stench can be so overpowering that walking nearby becomes difficult. Mosquitoes swarm over the clogged surface. What was once a flowing waterway is now, in places, little more than a garbage dump running into a city.

Yet the canal has seen one failed restoration after another. 

According to previous TBS reports, in 2007-08, the municipality first excavated it. In 2009, the city corporation spent Tk12 crore on renovations. In 2012, the LGED started renovation and bridge construction at a cost of Tk27 crore — but the work stopped midway. In 2018-19, the Water Development Board cleared just 2.5 kilometres at a cost of Tk3.5 crore. Now, another Tk15 crore has been allocated to the Water Development Board for dredging.

Money keeps coming. But the canal keeps dying.

According to Tuhin Wadud, there is no real benefit to repeatedly cleaning the canal because there is no flow in the Ghaghat. "Just cleaning it will be a waste of money," he said. 

Safiar made a similar point. "Right now, Shamasundori is a stinking place for us. Yet if the Ghaghat's water flow existed, we wouldn't need to spend so much money trying to fix Shamasundori."

The irony runs deep. The Shamasundori begins at the Ghaghat in the city's northwest, winds through 14 of Rangpur's 33 wards collecting the waste of an entire urban population, and empties back into the Khoksa Ghaghat in the southeast near Mahiganj Railway Bridge. 

The canal was designed to drain the city. Research on the Shamasundori published in the University of Texas at Austin's Planning Forum traces how the system once worked: water from the Teesta flowed into the Ghaghat, moved through the Shamasundori, and carried the city's waste away — giving the canal the current it needed. 

But the Ghaghat, having lost its source, could no longer give the Shamasundori what it needed to keep moving. The consequence became painfully visible in September 2020, when 433mm of rain fell in just 12 hours, breaking a 60-year record. The city remained underwater for two days, with residents wading through two to three feet of water.

With the river dying, the canal built to protect Rangpur from floods had become part of the reason the city could no longer escape them. 

What the Ghaghat is losing 

Losing the direct connection with the mother river Teesta, Ghaghat is getting narrower and narrower in places. Walking along the bank, one can see how far the river has receded — the opposite bank now lies much closer than it once did. 

Unlike the Teesta, the Ghaghat was never a wide river, therefore the changes do not always register clearly in satellite data. But the decay that Funu Mia and Idu Mia describe is visible on the ground — in the shrinking width, and in how little depth remains. 

According to Bangladesh Water Development Board records for the Jafarganj Road Crossing gauge station — SW96A — in Rangpur Sadar, the Ghaghat's annual minimum water level stood at 30.23 mMSL in 2000. By 2025, it had dropped to 28.30 mMSL — a fall of nearly two metres in a quarter-century.

The river's average annual level tells the same story, sliding from 30.90 mMSL to 28.89 mMSL over the same period.

Even the annual maximum — the level the river reaches at the height of the monsoon — has fallen, from 32.70 mMSL in 2000 to 31.31 mMSL in 2025, suggesting that the Ghaghat is carrying less water even when it floods.

The drop is not a rounding error. The Ghaghat's dry-season water level has fallen by nearly two metres — close to the height of a grown man. 

And it is not only the size of the river that the numbers bear out. The ecosystem is shrinking too. A 2023 study published in the Journal of Survey in Fisheries Sciences, surveying 85 species across the river, found that 12% were endangered, 11% vulnerable and 1% critically endangered — and fishers reported catching nearly 29% fewer fish compared to 12 years prior. 

The Rangpur City Corporation told TBS that it currently has no plan to manage waste in the Ghaghat. Its work, officials said, is limited to cleaning the Shamasundori canal, which eventually drains into the Khoksa Ghaghat. There is no plan yet to clean the Ghaghat itself or restore its flow, although officials said they would be willing to consider such measures in the future.

Repeated attempts by TBS to speak to officials at the Rangpur Water Development Board about the matter did not yield a response. On several occasions, officials asked to call back later, but subsequent calls went unanswered. Tuhin Wadud's experience has been much the same. There have been repeated calls to remove the embankment, he said. But it has remained.

When asked about the chemical waste that locals repeatedly mentioned, the Department of Environment officials said that all factories in the area have effluent treatment plants (ETPs) and that no chemical discharge is taking place. But that assurance sits uneasily alongside what locals, researchers and activists say. Both Tuhin Wadud and Safiar Rahman agreed factory waste does make its way into the river.

Measures such as properly operating and monitoring ETPs can help prevent further pollution. But the Ghaghat shows that a river also needs water to remain a river — and that old designs need to be reconsidered as cities change. Small rivers are easy to ignore, but the consequences can be heavy.

In the past, people could travel by boat through the Ghaghat to reach Rangpur. That waterway connection is now gone. In many places, sandbars have formed along the river, narrowing it further. 

The Ghaghat may be a small river, but its decline is closely tied to the life of Rangpur. Saving the river also means saving the waterways that once sustained the city.