57 rivers that cross the border

Where this table comes from

The Joint Rivers Commission of Bangladesh publishes it on its website as an 8-page PDF under "transboundary rivers". The file's own date is February 2022. Its own sources, printed under the table, are the Water Development Board's Rivers of Bangladesh (2011), IUCN's Rivers Beyond Borders (2014), the Land Record and Survey Department and Google Map. Source record.

How we rebuilt it

Like the ministry's river list, the PDF was made with the Nikosh font and its text layer gives many Bangla letters the wrong value. We read each glyph's true letter from the font itself, put the vowel signs Bangla draws before a consonant back after it, and cut the cells along the table's own lines. Serials 1 to 57 are all present. We compared the rebuilt table with the printed pages, row by row, and the wording of every claim on this site with the rebuilt text.

Among the 52 rows that give all the lengths, 51 add up (the length in the other country, plus any in Bhutan or China, plus the length in Bangladesh, equals the total). Karatoya is printed as 75 + 165 = 241, kept as printed. Three rows, the Dharla, Dudhkumar and Brahmaputra, also give lengths in Bhutan and China. Some typos in the original are kept too: the origin of rows 19 and 20 says পশ্চিমগঞ্জ where পশ্চিমবঙ্গ is meant, and row 41 spells Kulaura কুলাঊড়া.

How we joined it to the rest of the record

All 57 rivers are on the ministry's list of 1,415, so each row links to its row there. In 54 of the 57, the two documents also name a district in common; the other 3 (Tetulia, Dharla, Nayagang) match by name alone, because the documents name different districts or spell one differently. The Commission gives Bangla names only. The English spellings are ours, for searching.

27 of the rivers have a line on our atlas. Where one of our records only shares a name with a river here, its page says so, because the RDRC list gives names only and several rivers in Bangladesh can carry one name. "Rises" is read from the printed origin of each river: 49 name a place outside Bangladesh, 6 name only places in Bangladesh (they rise here and flow out), and 2 rise on the border (Feni and Matamuhuri).^{[Joint Rivers Commission]}

The border itself

A note under the table says where the boundary is not yet fixed: about 140 km of the Ichamati-Kalindi-Raimangal, 30 km of the Kushiyara, 2 km of the Muhuri and 10 km of the Sonai in Satkhira. On the other shared rivers it says the boundary, whether it follows the mid-stream or a bank, is already fixed permanently.^{[Joint Rivers Commission]}