An ecologically sensible response to India on IWT

Express Tribune

15-05-2025

The writer is an academic and researcher. He is also the author of Development, Poverty, and Power in Pakistan, available from Routledge
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Despite the elation surrounding Pakistan's response to India's post-Pahalgam aggression, many of the country's policymakers are still rightly worried about India's decision to suspend the longstanding Indus Water Treaty (IWT).
Pakistan has, thus far, stated that Indian attempts to disrupt the flow of the western rivers flowing from the Indus basin into Pakistan would be considered an act of war. Is it debatable whether India can build sufficient infrastructure at high altitudes to significantly lessen the flow of the three western rivers given to Pakistan by the IWT of 1960?
Pakistan can potentially challenge India's unilateral attempts to suspend the treaty via international arbitration mechanisms. Yet, earlier attempts by Pakistan to raise objections to Indian hydroelectric projects, such as the Kishanganga and Baglihar dams, using arbitration avenues provided under the water sharing treaty, proved cumbersome, and did not produce entirely satisfactory outcomes either.
The treaty itself is flawed, as it adopted an overly simplistic solution to the water sharing problem between the two rival nations. It merely bifurcated the six rivers flowing out of the Indus Basin. Pakistan was allocated the larger western rivers, and India got to control all the waters in the three eastern rivers, including the Ravi, which has now become a largely dead river due to aggressive Indian damming.
India was also allowed to build run-of-the-mill infrastructure on the western rivers, if it did not disrupt water flow into Pakistan. As climate change was not on anyone's radar in 1960, the World Bank brokered treaty did not envision the threat of receding glaciers, which are already disrupting the flow of rivers into both countries. The IWT did not either contend with the increasingly severe problem of pollution, allowing India to dump its wastewater (via the Hudaria, Fazilka and Salemshah drains and the Kanur nullah) into Pakistan.
For decades, India has been pumping wastewater effluents into Pakistan. The Hudiara Drain, for instance, originates in the Gurdaspur district in East Punjab, and after being joined by many tributaries in Amritsar, enters Pakistan near Laloo village. This natural storm water nullah now primarily carries sewage water mixed with untreated industrial waste from India. Unfortunately, hundreds of factories on the Pakistani side do the same, before this drain merges with Ravi River, 55 km inside Pakistani territory.
Despite the water in Hudiara drain being heavily polluted, numerous villages near the Wagah border grow vegetables irrigated using this wastewater. The Punjab government had a study conducted some years ago to better manage the Hudiara drain, but no practical steps have been taken to check the pollution of the drain by polluters on the Pakistani side, or to use IWT mechanisms to compel India to do the same.
Now that India has said that it no longer wants to comply with the treaty, Pakistan should engage relevant arbitration mechanisms to push back against this unreasonable step. It can also take immediate action on its side of the border to create pressure within India to respect Pakistan's status as a lower riparian state.
One way in which Pakistan can push back against Indian belligerence as an upper riparian is to block Indian drains discharging untreated waste into its territory. Ukraine did the same with drains flowing into its territory to pollute the Dnieper River from Russia, so this is a technically feasible option.
However, Pakistan will need to exercise caution if it aims to implement this measure, so it does not seem to be endorsing India's illegal abeyance of the longstanding water sharing treaty. Perhaps Pakistan can reach out to the World Bank, and other relevant experts, to see if such an action can be taken without undermining the basic principle of transborder water sharing.
Pakistan will have a much easier time making the case of preventing India from pumping untreated effluents into naturals storm drains coming into its territory, if Pakistan itself stops doing the same on its own side of the border.