Uttam Kumar Sinha, expert on Indus Water Treaty, is guest at Explained.Live

Indian Express

19 hours ago

Following the April 22 terrorist attack in Pahalgam, India has put the Indus Water Treaty with Pakistan in abeyance. The 1960 agreement between the two countries governs the sharing of waters of six transboundary rivers of the Indus basin.
India has also indicated that it wants to renegotiate the treaty afresh and has served a notice to Pakistan in this regard in January 2023. Pakistan is yet to respond to the notice.
Being the upper riparian state, India has a greater control over the flow of water in these rivers. This has sometimes been described as India's greatest leverage against Pakistan's support to terrorism, considering that country's heavy reliance on these rivers for agriculture, electricity and economy.
However, sharing of waters of transboundary rivers in general, and this treaty in particular, is an extremely complex issue, involving several layers of ramifications.
To understand some of these, The Indian Express has invited Uttam Kumar Sinha for an Explained.Live session on Friday. A Senior Fellow at Manohar Parrikar-IDSA and Managing Editor of Strategic Analysis, Sinha is one of the most informed people on the Indus Waters Treaty, having written an authoritative book on the subject, Indus Basin Uninterrupted, a few years ago. His second book on the treaty, Trial By Water: Indus Basin and India-Pakistan Relations, is expected to be released later this month.
For over five decades, the Indus Waters Treaty worked uninterrupted, surviving even wars between the two countries. However, Pakistan's continued use of terror attacks to hurt India could alter the situation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself has said that blood and water could not flow together, implying that India could press its advantage of being an upper riparian state in order to restrain Pakistan from supporting terrorism against India.
Additionally, it has been argued that the 1960 treaty was too generous to Pakistan, effectively allocating nearly 80 per cent of the combined flow of the rivers to that country. The ground situation has changed substantially in the last 65 years, requiring the treaty to be renegotiated to account for factors like increased population, climate change, and newer technologies that allow for better utilisation of river waters.
Incidentally, it is not just India that is unhappy with the treaty. Pakistan too thinks that the 1960 treaty was unfair to it, though officially it has never called for renegotiating the terms.