BWDB Officials Complete IWRM Training on Water Policy 1999, Water Act 2013 & Water Resources Regulations 2018

Management and Training International (MTI) Ltd. successfully conducted the three-day training course on Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) — focusing on the National Water Policy 1999, the Water Act 2013 and the Water Resources Regulations 2018 from 23 to 25 June 2026 at the BWDB Training Institute (BTI), Bhagyakul, Munshiganj. Twenty-five officials of the Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB), under the Ministry of Water Resources, took part in the course — the first batch under Package 21 of the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project (CSAWMP), BWDB Part.

Why IWRM, and Why Now

Bangladesh sits at the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna — the world's largest delta system — where flood, drought, salinity intrusion, riverbank erosion and upstream withdrawal all converge on the same finite resource. Managing that resource in silos no longer works. Integrated Water Resources Management is the internationally accepted response: a framework that coordinates the development of water, land and related resources so that economic and social welfare are maximised without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems.

For BWDB — the national authority responsible for flood control, drainage, irrigation, riverbank protection and coastal embankments — IWRM is not an abstract principle but the operating logic behind every scheme it designs, approves and maintains. This course was built to convert that logic into day-to-day field practice by grounding it in the specific statutes and policy instruments that govern the Board's mandate.

Inauguration & Project Leadership

The course was inaugurated in the presence of senior BWDB leadership. Pijush Krishna Kundu, Additional Chief Engineer (Civil) and Project Director of the CSAWM Project (BWDB Part), delivered the opening address and returned on the final day to close the course. In his remarks he underlined that the Board's engineers, extension officers and research officers must read every scheme — embankment, regulator, irrigation canal or dredging contract — against the statutory framework of the Water Act 2013 and the Water Resources Regulations 2018, rather than treating compliance as a documentation exercise at the end of a project cycle.

Dr. Md. Manirul Islam Khan, Managing Director of MTI Ltd., addressed the opening ceremony on behalf of the training service provider, outlining the methodology, the evaluation design and MTI Ltd.'s commitment across the full Package 21 and Package 22 training programme.

Course Management Team

Course administration was led by the BWDB Training Institute in coordination with the CSAWMP Project Coordination Unit.

Resource Persons

Nine senior BWDB professionals — including the Director General and the Additional Director General (Admin) — served as resource persons across the twelve sessions, bringing the perspective of policy, planning, regulation, field extension and project delivery into the same room.

The Legal & Policy Framework Covered

Rather than teaching IWRM as theory, the curriculum walked the cohort through the eight instruments that actually bind BWDB's work — from the founding policy of 1999 to the century-scale planning horizon of the Delta Plan 2100.

Day-by-Day Course Schedule

The course ran on a four-session daily rhythm — 09:00–10:20, 10:40–12:00, 12:00–13:20 and 14:20–15:40 — with a tea break at 10:20, lunch and prayer from 13:20, and a day-review and refreshment slot from 15:40 to 16:00.

Training Methodology

The course deliberately avoided a lecture-only format. Every session paired a technical input with an interactive method, and the cohort was assessed by a pre-evaluation on Day 1 and a post-evaluation on Day 3 so that the learning gain could be measured rather than assumed.

Group Work, Poster Presentation & Action Planning

The strongest signal of transfer came on Day 3. Participants were split into small groups, each tasked with applying the integrated framework to a real problem drawn from their own circles and divisions — then defending it in a poster presentation before their peers and the resource persons. Proposals ranged from stakeholder-consultation designs for embankment rehabilitation to compliance checklists for dredging contracts under the 2018 Regulations, and WMO strengthening plans for irrigation command areas.

Who Was in the Room

The twenty-five nominated officials were drawn deliberately from across BWDB's technical disciplines and its geographic spread — not a single-cadre cohort. Engineers sat alongside sociologists, fisheries and agriculture specialists, economists and environment & forest research officers; headquarters directorates in Dhaka were balanced by field offices in Rangpur, Kushtia, Jashore, Magura, Noakhali, Faridpur, Barishal and Gopalganj. That mix is what made the participatory sessions work: an Assistant Extension Officer from Barishal and a Deputy Chief (Fisheries) from the Directorate of Planning-3 bring genuinely different constraints to the same regulation.

Full Participant Roster

Closing Ceremony & Certification

The course closed on the afternoon of 25 June 2026. Participants offered their reflections on the three days — several noting that the sessions on the Water Act 2013 and the Water Resources Regulations 2018 answered compliance questions they had been carrying unresolved from live schemes. The Project Director delivered the closing speech, and certificates were handed to each participant on completion of the post-evaluation.

The Course in Pictures

Photographs from all three days — classroom sessions, group work, poster presentations and the closing ceremony — at the BWDB Training Institute, Bhagyakul, Munshiganj.

Why This Matters

Bangladesh does not lack water law. It lacks uniform fluency in applying it. A regulation is only as strong as the Assistant Extension Officer who has to invoke it at a village meeting, or the Sub-Divisional Engineer who has to write it into a dredging contract. By taking twenty-five officials from nine districts and putting the National Water Policy 1999, the BWDB Act 2000, the Water Act 2013, the Water Resources Regulations 2018 and the Delta Plan 2100 in front of them as a single connected system — taught by the Board's own Director General, Additional Director General and serving Project Directors — this course narrowed exactly that gap.

The Climate-Smart Agriculture and Water Management Project makes the investment strategic rather than incidental. Climate adaptation in the delta will be delivered through the same schemes BWDB already runs; whether those schemes are climate-smart depends on whether the people designing and supervising them can read policy, statute and regulation as one instrument. That is precisely what this batch was trained to do — and it is what the remaining batches under Packages 21 and 22 will continue to build.

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