UN panel verdict allows India access to Hariabhanga gas reserves, Dhaka gets 20 K sqkm EEZ

A historic development has taken place a few days ago regarding the 40-year-old India-Bangladesh maritime dispute, reported from the judicial precincts of The Hague in the Netherlands, which has not been as intensely reported and commented upon in Indian media as it deserved.

On 7 July a United Nations Tribunal awarded nearly four-fifth of the maritime territory to Bangladesh giving that country control of almost 20,000 square kilometers of the disputed area that expands to 25,000 square kilometers in the Bay of Bengal.

This is the second successive diplomatic victory for Bangladesh over its maritime concerns as in 2012 the UN tribunal had resolved the issue after Bangladesh had taken a similar matter with Myanmar to the tribunal.

Hariabhanga bonhomie. AFP

For India too it is a matter of satisfaction and also a diplomatic victory for several reasons. One, the United Nations' Permanent Court of Arbitration in Hague acknowledged India's sovereignty over New Moore Island and grants India concomitant access to the Hariabhanga river.

The disputed region was near the mouth of the Hariabhanga river, an area of huge strategic importance for India in the coming decades. In 2006, India had discovered 100 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in a creek about 50km to the south of the mouth of the Hariabhanga within the contested region. The Hariabhanga gas reserves are estimated to be almost twice what the entire Krishna-Godavari basin holds.

New Moore Island (called South Talpatti in Bangladesh) has been claimed by both India and Bangladesh ever since it came into being in Bay of Bengal following a cyclone in 1970. The uninhabited island disappeared in March 2010 due to climate change-related issues. Nonetheless, the UN tribunal’s acknowledgment of the Indian sovereignty in the area hands over considerable strategic leverage to India. That is because the region is said to be rich in oil and natural gas reserves. Now India can legally explore and exploit the natural resources in this area.

The second reason is equally important for India. While it is true that Bangladesh has ‘gained’ close to twenty thousand square kilometers in the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), India has reasons to be happy as the award has split the area in question in favour of India which is significantly closer to India’s claim than to that of Bangladesh.

Thirdly, this is good news for millions of Indian fishermen in West Bengal and Odisha as well as Bangladeshi fishermen as the settlement opens up miles of unchallenged open sea that was not available to them in past four decades. This stretch of the sea has been used primarily for transit and both India and Bangladesh had been preventing each other from using it for any other purpose, particularly fishing. Fishermen from both sides would thus get a bounty at a time when fish near the coast had depleted considerably, forcing them to go further out to sea entailing more costs in terms of money and time.

Over and above these reasons there is a huge diplomatic take-away for both India and Bangladesh from the historic UN tribunal award.

The closure of this long-pending dispute, wherein both the sides fell short of their expectations and yet got many things to cheer about, paves the way for a more intense bilateral cooperation. It is a win-win situation for both the sides as articulated by their foreign ministries.

Bangladesh Foreign Minister Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali described the tribunal's award as a "victory for both countries…and a win-win situation for the peoples of Bangladesh and India". Ali took care to laud India’s role in this episode at a press conference in Dhaka, saying thus: "We commend India for its willingness to resolve this matter peacefully by legal means and for its acceptance of the tribunal's judgment."

India too welcomed the development and MEA spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin remarked: "The settlement of the maritime boundary will further enhance mutual understanding and goodwill between India and Bangladesh by bringing to closure a long-pending issue. This paves the way for the economic development of this part of the Bay of Bengal, which will be beneficial to both countries."

Now that both the sides have made substantial gains and ended a major bilateral dispute as per the international law, it should spur them on to go for an amicable settlement of two other major pending issues: land boundary agreement and Teesta water sharing.

Gone: sea larger than Bengal UN tribunal awards Dhaka marine chunk

New Delhi, July 8: India has lost to Bangladesh a swathe of sea larger than the area of Bengal in a landmark ruling by a UN tribunal after decades of tug-of-war rooted in the Partition of 1947.

The UN’s Permanent Court of Arbitration has awarded Bangladesh 106,613sqkm of a total of 172, 220sqkm that according to New Delhi was under dispute but should belong to India. The award prompted a dissenting signature from New Delhi’s representative on the tribunal but the emissary was outvoted.

The ruling at The Hague settles a maritime boundary India has haggled over with Pakistan from 1947 to 1971, and then with Bangladesh.

Officially, both nations welcomed the settlement.

“We respect the verdict of the tribunal and are in the process of studying the award and its full implications,” Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin said today. He addedd that the settlement would “enhance mutual understanding and goodwill” by bringing to a closure “a long-pending issue.”

The verdict denies Indian fishermen access to the part of the sea lost to Bangladesh. It also means India cannot tap natural gas and oil reserves predicted in that region by the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation.

The contentions used by the five-member bench that heard the case have also upset Indian negotiators, apart from leaving sections of the foreign policy establishment worried about opposition from state governments on the eastern coast.

“This is very honestly a ruling that is not good for India,” a senior Indian official involved in the negotiations told The Telegraph. “The award of the area to Bangladesh is irrational in our view, and the arguments used to justify the decision quite frankly border on the absurd.”

The ruling was delivered to the governments of India and Bangladesh on Monday, with the strict orders that it could not be made public for another day. Today, the court published its 168-page verdict online, allowing the two governments to discuss the ruling publicly.

The dispute involves the demarcation of a maritime boundary between India and Bangladesh, which was East Pakistan before its independence in 1971.

Delineating the boundary was important because it defines both the sovereign maritime territory of each of the two neighbours — extending 12 nautical miles off the coast — and an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) that continues till 200 nautical miles into the sea.

Although a nation does not have territorial sovereignty over the EEZ — ships from other countries can enter those waters freely — that particular country alone can exploit the zone for economic gains. In the Bay of Bengal, India’s state-owned ONGC has been exploring for oil and gas since 2005.

After multiple rounds of unsuccessful negotiations, the government of current Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina approached the UN arbitration court in 2009.

India agreed to join the tribunal’s proceedings and nominated Pemmaraja Srinivasa Rao as its member to the five-judge bench hearing the case. Bangladesh’s nominee on the panel was Ghana’s Thomas A. Mensah. German international law veteran Rudiger Wolfrum headed the bench.

New Delhi’s arguments were made, among others, by the then attorney general, G.E. Vahanvati.

India insisted that only the area just south of Bangladesh and Bengal ought to be considered while demarcating the maritime boundary. This area amounted to 172,220sqkm — just under twice Bengal’s area of 88,752sqkm.

But Bangladesh demanded that parts of the sea close to the Odisha and Andhra Pradesh border, too, must be considered as disputed territory.

The UN bench not only agreed to Bangladesh’s demand but added even more area, defining the disputed region as a whopping 406,833sqkm — around the combined area of Uttar Pradesh, Bengal and Assam.

This definition extended the dispute to coastal waters running all the way down Odisha’s coast till Sandy Point near Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. Rao dissented, but was outvoted 4-to-1, the verdict report shows.

India then won a small battle against Bangladesh in the hearings — convincing the bench to accept a point on the map in the shallow seas just south of the Sunderbans that New Delhi insisted should mark the start of the boundary delineation. This victory allowed India to win a tiny island known as New Moore or South Talpatti that some satellite images suggest may have drowned in recent years.

But New Delhi soon lost a bigger battle, over the geographic method the arbitration court would use to mark out the boundary.

Dhaka had suggested that the judges take a compass and pencil, and mark the maritime boundary by dividing the angle created by the abutting Indian and Bangladesh coasts equally.

In effect, this “180-degree principle” meant drawing a straight line down from the starting point of the demarcation, to a point where both nations accept that their EEZ ends.

India contended that the equal-angle principle could not be adopted because curves further down its neighbour’s coast would effectively give Bangladesh greater sea territory than was fair.

India suggested an “equidistant-line” principle, under which the boundary marker at each point in the sea would be the spot equidistant from the nearest point on the Indian and Bangladesh coasts. This line, unlike the one proposed by Bangladesh, would twist and turn with the curves on the two coasts.

The arbitration tribunal initially accepted India’s equidistant principle but applied it only to the part of the sea very close to the coast. For the rest of the disputed area, it tweaked Bangladesh’s suggestion, only tilting the straight boundary line Bangladesh had proposed slightly to the east, at an angle of 177 degrees — or three degrees from the vertical.

The maritime boundary defined by the UN court justified its order by calculating the ratio of the total areas it awarded to India and Bangladesh.

But the ratio — India was awarded 300,220sqkm of the area, almost thrice Bangladesh’s 106,613sqkm — is misleading, according to Indian officials. They said the maritime territory demarcated to New Delhi included a large chunk along its eastern seaboard that was never really under dispute.

For Bangladesh, the victory is the second of its kind in quick succession — it won a UN arbitration battle against Myanmar in 2012, also over the demarcation of its maritime boundary with that nation.

List of the verified oldest men

This is a list of the 100 verified oldest men, arranged in descending order of each individual's age in years and days. A year typically refers to a calendar year, the time between two dates with the same name. However, years may be of different lengths due to the presence or absence of a leap day within the year, or to the conversion of dates from one calendar to another. A supercentenarian is considered 'verified' if his or her claim has been validated by an international body that specifically deals in longevity research, such as the Gerontology Research Group.

The oldest man ever, whose age has been verified, is Jiroemon Kimura, a Japanese man who died on 12 June 2013 at the age of 116 years, 54 days. There are twoverified living supercentenarians on this list, both of whom live in Japan, the older of whom is Sakari Momoi, age 112 years, 87 days.

100 verified oldest men

      Deceased       Living

Rank	Name	Birth date	Death date	Age (at death, or as of 3 May 2015)	Place of death or residence
1	Jiroemon Kimura	19 April 1897	12 June 2013	116 years, 54 days	Japan
2	Christian Mortensen	16 August 1882	25 April 1998	115 years, 252 days	United States[a]
3	Emiliano Mercado del Toro	21 August 1891	24 January 2007	115 years, 156 days	Puerto Rico
4	Mathew Beard	9 July 1870	16 February 1985	114 years, 222 days	United States
5	Walter Breuning	21 September 1896	14 April 2011	114 years, 205 days	United States
6	Yukichi Chuganji	23 March 1889	28 September 2003	114 years, 189 days	Japan
7	Joan Riudavets	15 December 1889	5 March 2004	114 years, 81 days	Spain
8	Fred Hale	1 December 1890	19 November 2004	113 years, 354 days	United States
9	Johnson Parks	15 October 1884	17 July 1998	113 years, 275 days	United States
10	Tomoji Tanabe	18 September 1895	19 June 2009	113 years, 274 days	Japan
11	John Ingram McMorran	19 June 1889	24 February 2003	113 years, 250 days	United States
12	Frederick Frazier	27 January 1880	14 June 1993	113 years, 138 days	United States
13	James Sisnett	22 February 1900	23 May 2013	113 years, 90 days	Barbados[b]
14	Walter Richardson	7 November 1885	25 December 1998	113 years, 48 days	United States
15	Henry Allingham	6 June 1896	18 July 2009	113 years, 42 days	United Kingdom
16	Antonio Todde	22 January 1889	3 January 2002	112 years, 346 days	Italy
17	Moses Hardy	6 January 1894	7 December 2006	112 years, 335 days	United States
18	John Evans	19 August 1877	10 June 1990	112 years, 295 days	United Kingdom
19	George Francis	6 June 1896	27 December 2008	112 years, 204 days	United States
20	Denzo Ishizaki	20 October 1886	29 April 1999	112 years, 191 days	Japan
21	Josep Armengol	23 July 1881	20 January 1994	112 years, 181 days	Spain
22	Giovanni Frau	29 December 1890	19 June 2003	112 years, 172 days	Italy
23	John Painter	20 September 1888	1 March 2001	112 years, 162 days	United States
24	Alphaeus Philemon Cole	12 July 1876	25 November 1988	112 years, 136 days	United States
25	Augusto Moreira	6 October 1896	13 February 2009	112 years, 130 days	Portugal
26	George Johnson	1 May 1894	30 August 2006	112 years, 121 days	United States
27	Salustiano Sanchez	8 June 1901	13 September 2013	112 years, 97 days	United States[c]
28	Sakari Momoi[1]	5 February 1903	Living[1]	112 years, 87 days	Japan
29	Gengan Tonaki	30 October 1884	24 January 1997	112 years, 86 days	Japan
30	Yasutaro Koide[1]	13 March 1903	Living[1]	112 years, 51 days	Japan
31	Tadanosuke Hashimoto	27 April 1891	31 May 2003	112 years, 34 days	Japan
32	Kumekichi Tani	20 April 1891	12 May 2003	112 years, 22 days	Japan
33	James Wiggins	15 October 1879	16 October 1991	112 years, 1 day	United States
34	Arturo Licata	2 May 1902	24 April 2014	111 years, 357 days	Italy
35	Walter H. Seward	13 October 1896	14 September 2008	111 years, 337 days	United States
36	Maurice Floquet	25 December 1894	10 November 2006	111 years, 320 days	France
37	James McCoubrey	13 September 1901	5 July 2013	111 years, 295 days	United States[d]
38	John Mosely Turner	15 June 1856	21 March 1968	111 years, 280 days	United Kingdom
39	Hermann Dörnemann	27 May 1893	2 March 2005	111 years, 279 days	Germany
40	Antonio Urrea	18 February 1888	15 November 1999	111 years, 270 days	Spain
41	Arthur Carter	5 October 1889	11 June 2001	111 years, 249 days	United States
42	Jan Machiel Reyskens	11 May 1878	7 January 1990	111 years, 241 days	Netherlands[e]
43	Joe Thomas	1 May 1875	14 December 1986	111 years, 227 days	United States
44	James Zackry	15 August 1881	14 March 1993	111 years, 211 days	United States
45	Tanekichi Onishi	15 February 1900	11 September 2011	111 years, 208 days	Japan
46	Kiyoshi Igarashi	2 August 1897	23 February 2009	111 years, 205 days	Japan
47	Herman Smith-Johannsen	15 June 1875	5 January 1987	111 years, 204 days	Norway
48	Ernest Pusey	5 May 1895	19 November 2006	111 years, 198 days	United States
49	Thomas Nelson, Sr.	8 July 1895	9 January 2007	111 years, 185 days	United States
50	Jokichi Ikarashi	26 January 1902	23 July 2013	111 years, 178 days	Japan
51	Earl Brush	17 July 1893	10 January 2005	111 years, 177 days	United States
52	Antonio de Castro	6 January 1898	22 June 2009	111 years, 167 days	Portugal
53	Sukesaburo Nakanishi	15 March 1896	22 August 2007	111 years, 160 days	Japan
54	Luther Goding	1 July 1884	5 December 1995	111 years, 157 days	United States
55	Jan Pieter Bos	12 July 1891	15 December 2002	111 years, 156 days	Netherlands
56	Emile Fourcade	29 July 1884	29 December 1995	111 years, 153 days	France[f]
57	Benjamin Harrison Holcomb	3 July 1889	2 December 2000	111 years, 152 days	United States
58	Aarne Arvonen	4 August 1897	1 January 2009	111 years, 150 days	Finland
59	George Frederick Ives	17 November 1881	12 April 1993	111 years, 146 days	Canada[g]
60	Jan Goossenaerts	30 October 1900	21 March 2012	111 years, 143 days	Belgium
61	Garland Adair	30 July 1898	11 December 2009	111 years, 134 days	United States
62	Anders Engberg	1 July 1892	6 November 2003	111 years, 128 days	Sweden
63	Alexander Imich	4 February 1903	8 June 2014	111 years, 124 days	United States[h]
64	Jack Lockett	22 January 1891	25 May 2002	111 years, 123 days	Australia[i]
65	Henry Hartmann	14 July 1894	10 November 2005	111 years, 119 days	United States
66	Shelby Harris	31 March 1901	25 July 2012	111 years, 116 days	United States
67	Daniel Guzmán-García	6 February 1897	21 May 2008	111 years, 105 days	Colombia
68	Sadayoshi Tanabe	20 October 1888	18 January 2000	111 years, 90 days	Japan
69	Makaru Nakanishi	15 December 1901	28 February 2013	111 years, 75 days	Japan
70	Henry Pfeiffer	22 March 1881	23 May 1992	111 years, 62 days	United States
71	Zachariah Blackistone	16 February 1871	18 April 1982	111 years, 61 days	United States
72	Antonio Baldo	6 July 1887	28 August 1998	111 years, 53 days	Italy
73	Edward Bernard	22 June 1889	11 August 2000	111 years, 50 days	United States
74	Francisco Fernández	24 July 1901	7 September 2012	111 years, 45 days	Spain
75	Norio Kawada	25 April 1892	6 June 2003	111 years, 42 days	Japan
76	Kama Nakasone	23 November 1891	1 January 2003	111 years, 39 days	Japan
77	Harry Patch	17 June 1898	25 July 2009	111 years, 38 days	United Kingdom
78	Peter Solum	3 May 1882	5 June 1993	111 years, 33 days	United States
79	Masao Kaga	1 June 1902	26 June 2013	111 years, 25 days	Japan
80	Giovanni Ligato	18 February 1901	2 March 2012	111 years, 13 days	Italy
81	Domenico Minervino	10 May 1880	22 May 1991	111 years, 12 days	Italy
82	Nijiro Tokuda	10 June 1895	12 June 2006	111 years, 2 days	Japan
83	Valentino Stella	2 January 1886	1 January 1997	110 years, 365 days	Italy
84	Giichi Okumura	18 October 1896	13 October 2007	110 years, 360 days	Japan
85	Charles Shebanek	9 September 1883	27 August 1994	110 years, 352 days	United States
86	Antonio Pierro	22 February 1896	8 February 2007	110 years, 351 days	United States[j]
87	Carl Berner	27 January 1902	7 January 2013	110 years, 346 days	United States[k]
88	Gregory Pandazes	15 January 1873	22 December 1983	110 years, 341 days	United States[l]
	Eiju Tsuru	4 February 1879	11 January 1990	110 years, 341 days	Japan
90	Charlie Nelson	21 September 1867	20 August 1978	110 years, 333 days	United States
	Yoshio Nakagawa	19 December 1901	16 November 2012	110 years, 333 days	Japan
92	Masatake Kinoshita	20 August 1897	17 July 2008	110 years, 332 days	Japan
93	Linus Reinhart	28 July 1892	14 June 2003	110 years, 321 days	United States
94	Lloyd Myers	20 March 1892	1 February 2003	110 years, 318 days	United States
95	Frank Ahmann	11 May 1889	22 March 2000	110 years, 316 days	United States
96	Leopold Vietoris	4 June 1891	9 April 2002	110 years, 309 days	Austria
97	Takashi Hattori	12 March 1898	12 January 2009	110 years, 306 days	Japan
98	Walter Wilcox	1 November 1872	11 August 1983	110 years, 283 days	United States
99	Galo Leoz	22 April 1879	23 January 1990	110 years, 276 days	Spain
100	A.L.M.[2]	11 April 1879	1 January 1990	110 years, 265 days	Spain

a^ Mortensen was born in Denmark.
b^ Sisnett was born in Barbados, which was at the time of his birth a British colony; now it is an independent country.
c^ Sanchez was born in Spain.
d^ McCoubrey was born in Newfoundland, which was then a separate British colony in 1901. It is now a part of Canada.
e^ Reyskens was born in Belgium.
f^ Fourcade was born in French Algeria; it is now Algeria.
g^ Ives was born in the United Kingdom.
h^ Imich was born in Częstochowa, which was then a part of the Russian Empire. It is now in Poland.
i^ Lockett was born in the former British colony Victoria, which is now part of Australia.
j^ Pierro was born in Italy.
k^ Berner was born in Germany.
l^ Pandazes was born in Greece.