Time to reimagine the idea of the Indus

Hindustan Times

06-05-2025

In many ways, India's decision to suspend the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) in response to the Pahalgam terrorist strike is a tale of a death foretold. After all, it was preceded by four communications to Pakistan by India since January 2023, calling for a revision of the treaty. A parliamentary standing committee also had, in 2021, exhorted the government to renegotiate the IWT with Pakistan. In fact, India's official communication to Pakistan suspending the treaty, invoked Article 62 of the Vienna Convention on Law of Treaties, and referred to 'a fundamental change of circumstances' that had reworked the core assumptions that informed the treaty. For a treaty widely seen as an example of successful transboundary water diplomacy, what does this eddy in its fortunes mean? At 64, are its glory days clearly behind it? Both within India and Pakistan, the IWT has been hotly contested (PTI)
There is no denying that the IWT has remained in a time warp of sorts by choice, having passed up the opportunity to modify its provisions from time to time, as provided under the treaty. It is not surprising then that it finds itself with virtually no tools to cope with the set of challenges that confront the Indus waterscape. But then, for a treaty that is fundamentally a product of distributive bargaining, fed on large doses of geopolitical angst and a zero-sum logic, there was perhaps little appetite for much else. The only established mechanism for dialogue between India and Pakistan that has survived wars, discord and distrust, thus finds that it simply has no bandwidth to deal with the governance challenges of the day.
But, while the treaty faces an existential moment of its own, it is the river that finds itself at the deep end. Water governance challenges, ecosystem degradation, cycles of floods and droughts, resource interventions that do not respect the supply potential of mountain ecologies, have impacted livelihoods and overall well-being for riparian populations. Slaking the thirst of a rapidly growing population has compounded the severe stress on water resources. India and Pakistan have seen their populations surge from 46 million and 436 million respectively at the time that the treaty was signed, to 240 million and 1.4 billion today. It is also projected that 36% of the Indus basin's glacier volume could be lost by 2100. This is a chilling warning for a basin spanning parts of Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan that is the lifeline for 268 million people. Approximately 60% of the total irrigation water used in the region is sourced from snow and glacier melt. Groundwater depletion is also a serious problem within the basin, with over-extraction leading to declining water tables and aquifer stress particularly in Pakistan. In this regard, a possible template for the region to consider could be the 2010 Guarani Aquifer agreement that establishes a framework to jointly manage the large transboundary groundwater resource shared by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.
Both within India and Pakistan, the IWT has been hotly contested, decried as the 'most unfair document' by Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah. The fact that Pakistan sources nearly 80% of the Indus water system has also been a sore point, with both Jammu and Kashmir as well as Punjab demanding what they claim are their rightful shares. Within Pakistan, the 1991 Water Apportionment Accord has long been a bone of contention, with Sindh's chronic water shortages being blamed on Punjab's controversial Chashma-Jhelum Link Canal and Greater Thal Canal projects. These have led to calls to radically rethink the Indus River System Authority beyond volumetric flows and to make it, as Ali Tauqeer Sheikh, regional director for Asia, Climate Development and Knowledge Network, argues, 'a climate-smart national institution owned and managed by the provinces'.
Could this looming crisis become a catalyst for reimagining the idea of the Indus? Interestingly, other imaginations of the river have been taking shape, building habits of trust, filling governance gaps, and knowledge base. For instance, hybrid policy networks such as the Upper Indus Basin Network bring together practitioners and researchers to foster science-based regional cooperation among the four Indus basin countries. These are beginning to plug critical knowledge gaps be they data gaps on precipitation, spatial variability of snow and glacial melt, or gender vulnerability by looking at climate-induced nutritional security among others. Networks such as the Freshwater Action Network South Asia, South Asian Biosphere Reserve Network, Asian Network of Sustainable Agriculture and Bioresources, Himalayan Conservation Approaches and Technologies, and Asian Environmental Compliance and Enforcement Network are creating opportunities for a diverse set of local actors to engage in cross-border multisectoral collaboration across sectors such as energy, environment, health and climate change, among others.
Other transboundary river basins also offer cues to take the Indus conversation beyond the high table, with the potential to link actors and agendas. An interesting example from Southern Africa is the Every River Has its People Project, a basin-wide international forum to which rural communities in Angola, Namibia and Botswana send representatives. (It is on the Okavango river that traverses the three countries).
Changing the narrative on the Indus must start at the basin and the sub-basin levels, given that it is the riparian stakeholder who has the highest stakes in shifting the grammar of securitisation. These communities of practice could produce a less deterministic imagination of the Indus, one that holds the promise to secure the lives and livelihoods of its riverine communities. Such a practice-based template will have the potential to incorporate a rich and hitherto untapped corpus of domain and field knowledge that national-level policy makers have no means of acquiring on their own. Inverting the policy gaze will be germane to understanding not just the ebb and flow of transboundary water politics in the Indus basin but also changing its course in potentially imaginative and inclusive ways.
Nimmi Kurian is professor, Centre for Policy Research. The views expressed are personal