The India-Pakistan Indus Water Commission (IWC) held its 104th meeting in Lahore from 29-31 March this year and at the end of three days of talks, no major breakthrough was achieved. The countries decided to continue the talks at the next meeting which would be held in New Delhi in May this year.

At the meeting, Pakistan objected to the 45MW Nimoo-Bazgo hydel power project on the Indus River in Leh district of Jammu and Kashmir because it said that it violated the 1960 Indus Water Treaty (IWT). It claimed that India did not provide Pakistan with enough notice (6 months under the IWT) before the construction of the dam even though India maintains that it did. Pakistan also raised the issue of the Kishenganga power project. Pakistan claims that this Project will divert the waters of the Ganga, called Neelam in Pakistan, and will also lead to a 27 per cent shortage in water in Pakistan. It will also interfere with Pakistan’s proposed Neelum-Jhelum hydropower project that has been designed to generate 969MW of electricity.

According to informed Indian officials, India is within its rights to construct the Kishenganga Project and has been working on it since the 1980s. According to the IWT, the country that completes the project first will have priority rights over the water use. Under this pressure, Pakistan has been experimenting with various options to speed up the process, including tunnel boring machines that will reduce the construction time of the Neelum-Jhelum Project by two years. According to officials, under the IWT, any country that starts a project on a shared River must ensure that “the then existing uses” of the other country are protected. The Kishenganga Project was started by India in the 1980s, and at that time there was no use of the waters by Pakistan. If Pakistan had been using the waters at that time, it must substantiate that with data, something that has not been provided so far.

At a recent Forum organized by the Karachi Council on Foreign Relations in Islamabad, the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan, Sharat Sabharwal said that India had never stopped water flows to Pakistan, even during the wars. He said that people in Pakistan questioned the IWT but the treaty actually assigned 80 per cent of the waters to Pakistan. Moreover, under the IWT, India has limited use of waters from the western rivers of the Indus (that were given to Pakistan), and that has not been used so far. According to an Indian official in the Indian Ministry of Water, India also has storage entitlement of 3.6 MAF on the western rivers but it has not built any storage so far. 

Pakistan has gone as far as calling the IWT an inefficient forum for resolving water issues; elevating the water issue to a “core issue”; and including it in the composite dialogue, but India has refused to discard the IWT. At the March meeting of the IWC, Pakistan threatened to take these issues before an external arbitration panel, a provision given under Article IX of the IWT, but something that has never been used before. Pakistan had also asked the US to intervene to help resolve this issue but the US refused.

It must be appreciated that the IWT was signed at a time when water was available in abundance and when climate change was not affecting water supplies. Moreover, being a water separation and not a water sharing treaty, the IWT includes very limited areas of cooperation between the two countries. Instead of abandoning a treaty that has managed extremely well despite three wars between the two countries; new and innovative areas of cooperation, outside the Treaty should be envisaged. Islamabad has suggested joint water shed management and joint commissioning of environmental studies that would address emerging concerns arising from reduced flows. The countries could also look into joint electrical projects and energy swaps. 

It cannot be denied that Pak is facing water shortage. Water availability in Pakistan has fallen 70% since the early 1950s to 1500 cubic meters per capita but that is caused by a motley of factors. India insists that the shortage in water in Pakistan is due to climatic changes. Pakistan’s problems have also been compounded by the inter-provincial fighting on Kalabagh, which has delayed the construction of the dam.  This leads to huge reserves of water, which could have been harnessed, to just flow unutilized into the Arabian Sea.

India has consistently maintained that it has never violated the Indus Water Treaty and all its projects have been constructed according to the requirements of the Treaty. There is a need to spread this information more publicly within Pakistan and India so that the public gets a more holistic view of the scenario and is not swayed by the venomous rhetoric being fanned by the media in Pakistan. The major dailies in Pakistan field at least 3-4 articles every week on how India is stealing Pakistan’s water and the tirade has even dubbed this as “India’s Aggression” and “India’s Water Terrorism”. It is imperative to work on resolving this issue before it becomes so huge that it manages to claim “core issue” status.