Following the dastardly massacre of innocent Hindu tourists at Pahalgam, India swiftly declared that it will put the 1960 Indus Water Treaty (IWT), brokered by the World Bank, on abeyance. The IWT has survived three major wars between the two nations besides Kargil, and its suspension will certainly escalate the tension between two nuclear armed belligerent nations. However, nothing will change on the ground, at least not in the foreseeable future.
The origins of the IWT date back to the Partition. Indus, which has given India its name, and its five tributaries, have sustained humanity on the subcontinent for millennia. Both India and Pakistan depend on Indus water for agriculture, irrigation, and electricity, but without the Indus system water, Pakistan would face serious existential threats. So, at Partition, the two countries signed an agreement called the Standstill Agreement to allow the flow of water across the border, and when that agreement expired in 1948, they negotiated for nine long ears, mediated by the World Bank, to sign the IWT in September 1960.
The treaty gives India access to the waters of the three eastern rivers: the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, while Pakistan gets the waters of the three western rivers: the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, which account for almost 80 per cent of the shared basin’s water. While India can use the western rivers to generate hydel power and for limited irrigation, it cannot build infrastructure that restricts the flow of water from those rivers into Pakistan, either by storing or diverting their flows.
Despite the bellicosity between hostile neighbours, the IWT survived, even though every major terrorist violence inflicted by Pakistani state-sponsored actors had threatened to derail it. With no expiry date, the treaty also provides a standing mechanism for cooperation and dispute resolution by a Permanent Indus Commission with one commissioner from each country. One can refer unresolv – ed differences to a neutral expert, and legal disputes to an international Court of Arbitration, and the World Bank can also provide mediation.
The Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab are lifelines to Pakistan, as it has no alternative sources of water and relies heavily on the western rivers for its agriculture, irrigation and energy. Between May and September, these rivers carry tens of billions of cumecs (cubic metre per second) of water from melting glaciers to nourish agriculture in Pakistan’s Punjab and Sindh provinces. Its irrigation system depends almost entirely on the predictable timing of flows from the western rivers, when farmers plan their sowing depending on the canal schedules ~ covering almost 80 per cent of Pakistan’s irrigated agriculture.
Even minor changes in the flow can cause significant disruptions to Pakistan’s largely agrarian economy, delaying wheat planting cycles, causing missed sowing windows, lower productivity and higher costs, besides further degrading an already stressed Indus Delta, 43 per cent of the arable land of which is already salinity affected, and reduced water flow may accelerate further desertification.
It may also exacerbate the highly charged water sharing disputes bet – ween Punjab and Sind. Pakistan has limited water storage capacity, with its major dams such as Mangla and Tarbela having a combined live storage of just 14.4 million acre feet (MAF), which is about 10 per cent of the country’s annual entitlement of 135 MAF under the IWT. When the water flow is reduced, for example, during the dry winter months, this storage shortfall makes Pakistan highly vulnerable. Reduced or controlled upstream flows can also play havoc with its power, a third of which comes from hyd l generation by water flowing through Tarbela, Mangla, and other dams.
As per IWT, India can utilise 20 per cent of the western rivers without disturbing directions of flow. While it can construct hydel power projects on them, these must be “run-of-the-river” schemes, meaning they can hold or divert water for power generation only temporarily, but must not significantly alter or reduce the total flow reaching Pakistan. India has built several dams as reservoirs for run-of-the-river power projects in Jammu and Kashmir including Baglihar, Ratle, Dulhasti, Salal dams on the Chenub, and Kishenganga, Uri I and II on the Jhelum. Several of these projects are already operational but generate only 2.5 GW of power, as against the potential of 20 GW from the western system.
Large projects like the 850-MW Ratle dam are still under construction, and work on some like the 0.3 MAF Tulbul dam on the Jhelum remains suspended. Under IWT, India can use the waters also for irrigation of up to 13.4 lakh acres in J&K and Ladakh, of which only 6.42 lakh acres are now being irrigated. After a neutral expert ruled in India’s favour in Baglihar dam which Pakistan had contested, it disputed India’s diversion of water from the Kishanganga river ~ a tributary of the Jhelum ~ into the Jhelum basin to generate power and took the matter to an international Court of Arbitration.
The Court, while allowing India to continue with the project by diverting water, ruled that India must maintain a minimum flow of 9 cumecs at all times to protect Pakistan’s downstream uses and environment. It also put certain restrictions on the dam design. That was in 2013. Three years later, Uri happened. India immediately suspended the Indus Commission meetings, and vowed to maximise the use of its 20 per cent share ~ it was using only 4 per cent ~ and for the first time, Indian leaders publicly linked security issues to the continuation of IWT. Water was being weaponised.
After Pulwama in 2019, the rhetoric bec – ame even more vitriolic, but the reality hardly changed on the ground. In 2016, Pakistan again approached the World Bank for setting up a Court of Arbitration on the Ratle project, objecting to the height and design of the dam, that it alleged would give India the potential to manipulate water flow. India asked for a neutral expert, as per IWT’s mechanism. While both countries remained deadlocked over the procedure, World Bank invoked both the Court of Arbitration and neutral expert processes simultaneously ~ an unprecedented step under the IWT. Meanwhile, in January 2023, India formally invoked Article XII (3) of IWT and sought modification of the treaty itself for the first time, citing climate change, national needs and Pakistan’s obstructions, which Pakistan swiftly rejected. In September 2024, India served a formal no – tice to amend the treaty that was outdated and unfairly favourable to Pakistan. Then Pahalgam happened and India suspended the treaty.
However, it is important to note that the immense volume of water flowing in western rivers from May to September is too large to significantly disrupt Pakistan’s agriculture without also flooding India’s upstream regions, because India lacks sufficient storage infrastructure. The western rivers derive 60-70 per cent of their flow from melting glaciers and 30-40 per cent from monsoon rains, and this natural flow will continue despite the suspension, ensuring the uncontrolled annual flow of 135 MAF of water to Pakistan. India’s run-of-the-river projects have rather limited storage capacity of only around 2.5 MAF against the full entitlement of 3.6 MAF. Regulated releases from India’s dams and barrages supplement the natural flow during dry seasons. Suspending the treaty allows India to halt these releases, but given its limited storage infrastructure, India can hardly exercise any effective control.
Even if India builds out its full allowed storage at enormous cost which will take long, and coordinates releases across all its dams, it can only temporarily regulate and delay flows to Pakistan upsetting its irrigation and cropping patterns, especially during critical agricultural periods, but cannot permanently divert or consume this water. The IWT mandates real-time flow data exchange to ensure that India is not withholding water during critical periods like the pre-sowing season; its suspension would stop such exchange. There are also geographical constraints in building significant water storage in J&K, and also political risks from potential terrorists backed by Pakistan. Also, as the Tufts University academic HF Khans has pointed out, India is itself a downstream riparian on the Brahmaputra that originates in China, and creating a precedent may not be good as China may use the same strategy against India.
The IWT was designed to ensure that India cannot restrict Pakistan’s share of the natural flow; most of the Indus system’s water will continue to flow to it due to natural geography. Thus, there are physical and practical limits to the harm India’s suspension of the treaty can cause to Pakistan’s economy in the foreseeable future, and nothing beyond the escalation of rhetoric may be seen on the ground. India can fast-track its storage projects like the Pakal Dul (1,000 MW) and the Sawalkot (1856 MW) dams on the Chenab to increase the regulated flow. Of the eastern rivers, India only uses 90 per cent of the 33 MAF allocated under IWT, and the unutilised flow of 2 MAF from the Ravi and 5.5 MAF from the Sutlej/Beas systems are benefiting Pakistan due to inadequate Indian storage ~ and this India can certainly improve. It has already completed Shahpurkandi dam on the Ravi in 2024, which redirects its water entirely into Indian territory.
The planned Ujh dam also on the Ravi can further restrict the flow of surplus water to Pakistan, which currently gets about 9.3 billion cumecs from India’s share. Pakistan had declared that it would treat the suspension of IWT as an act of war. It may only intensify diplomatic escalation, but its fragile economy, perverted polity and complete lack of people’s trust on both its government and its army hardly leave room for any other manoeuvre.
(The writer is a commentator, author and academic. Opinions expressed are personal)