The maritime boundary dispute between Bangladesh and India is set to be resolved next month. The United Nation's Permanent Court of Arbitration is likely to pronounce a verdict over the issue in June, a senior foreign ministry official said Monday.
Under the law of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) Bangladesh has laid claim to the territorial waters of 12 nautical miles, another 188 nautical miles of Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and 260 nautical miles of sea bed known as outer continental shelf.
Bangladesh expects to have control over nearly 25,000 square kilometers of maritime areas in the Bay of Bengal following the verdict, the foreign ministry official added.
Bangladesh insists on applying the equitable method to settle the issue, while India is arguing for equidistance method in drawing the boundary, the official said.
Bangladesh has argued that equidistance method cannot be applied in the case of Bangladesh and India as it distorts the boundary due to the double concavity of the coast of Bangladesh.
If the equidistance method is applied, Bangladesh would be cut-off by the boundary line of the neighbours from west and east, denying its 12 mile-territorial sea, 200-mile EEZ and outer continental shelf beyond the 200-mile of sea-bed.
Bangladesh would, in turn, be a sea-locked state, the official added.
Bangladesh lodged arbitration in 2009, taking the neighbouring India to the United Nations tribunal to settle the decades-old dispute over sea territory that has threatened its rights to explore hydrocarbon and other resources in the Bay of Bengal.
Both the country earlier held talks bilaterally but could not resolve the dispute because of the differences as to the methods to be applied to delimit the sea boundary.
India ratified the 1982 UNCLOS in 1995 and Bangladesh ratified it in 2001 and both of them are bound to obey the verdict on dispute settlement as envisaged by UNCLOS.
Bangladesh nominated former Judge Thomas Mensah from Ghana and India nominated P. Sreenivasa Rao, former Legal Adviser of the External Affairs Ministry.
The boundary dispute is affecting oil and gas exploration in the prospective Bay of Bengal, and Bangladesh has not been able to ink a production sharing contract with Ireland's Tullow for shallow water gas block SS-08-05.
Tullow secured the block in a competitive bidding round for offshore blocks in February 2008.
India in 2007 had licensed a part of block SS-08-05 as block NEC-DWN-2004/2 to Australia's Santos. This Indian block also overlaps Bangladeshi blocks SS-08-09 and SS-08-14.
Another Santos-licensed block further south, NEC-DWN-2004/1, overlaps Bangladeshi blocks DS-08-14, DS-08-19 and DS-08-24, the official said.
Santos has adopted 'forced majeure' in all the disputed offshore blocks in the Bay of Bengal since early 2009 and refrained from conducting any exploration activity in the disputed blocks since then, he added.
Earlier, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) based in Hamburg, Germany gave its verdict on March 14, 2012 settling the maritime boundary dispute between Bangladesh and Myanmar.
The ITLOS verdict upheld Bangladesh's claims over a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone in the Bay of Bengal along with a share of the outer continental shelf beyond 200 miles in a separate boundary dispute with Myanmar, said a foreign ministry official.
Bangladesh, however, had to give up claim on eight deep water gas blocks out of the total 12 blocks under 2008 bidding round that were under dispute with Myanmar.
DS-08-13, DS-08-17, DS-08-18, DS-08-22, DS-08-23, DS-08-16, DS-08-27 and DS-08-28 are the deepwater blocks that went to Myanmar, and excluded from the map of 2012 bidding round, a senior Petrobangla official said.
It got partial rights on deep water gas blocks DS-08-12, DS-08-16 and DS-08-21, which have been renamed as DS-12, DS-16 and DS-21 and offered in 2012 bidding round.
Bangladesh also excluded a total of 11 shallow and deep water gas blocks from 2008 bidding map for offer in 2012 bidding due to maritime boundary dispute with neighbouring India.
The blocks are - SS-01, SS-05, DS-09, DS-10, DS-11, DS-14, DS-15, DS-19, DS-20, DS-24 and DS-25.
During the previous offshore bidding round in February 2008, Bangladesh had offered 28 blocks -- 20 in deep water and eight in shallow water.
The response to the offer was lukewarm because of Bangladesh's maritime boundary dispute with Myanmar and India.
The two countries had protested the 2008 bidding round and had communicated with the IOCs not to take part in it.
As a result, Bangladesh could award only parts of two deepwater gas blocks-DS-08-10 and DS-08-11 -- to ConocoPhillips, three years after launching the bidding round on June 16, 2011 following a series of meetings.
BD-India maritime dispute to be resolved next month
M Azizur Rahman | Published: May 20, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00
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