Opinion Indus waters civilisation
Fifty years on,the treaty is a sparkling study in resolving disputes
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Reaching 50 years is a milestone. Landmarks are also often accompanied by reality checks. It is a remarkable achievement that the Indus Waters Treaty,signed between India and Pakistan on September 19,1960,has survived wars and a tumultuous relationship. Yet,the robustness of the treaty has come under serious strain,threatening to undercut peace efforts and create a flashpoint. Fifty years on,it needs to be asked whether water rationality that led to the IWT will continue to hold in the future?
Partitioning the Indus river system,compromising the six rivers,was inevitable after the partition of India in 1947. The sharing formula,devised after prolonged negotiations and the World Banks good offices,sliced the Indus system into two halves. The three western rivers (Indus,Jhelum and Chenab) went to Pakistan and the three eastern rivers (Sutlej,Ravi and Beas) were portioned to India. Equitable it may have seemed,but the fact remained that India conceded 80 per cent of the total flow of the rivers to Pakistan. It also gave £62 million to Pakistan to help build replacement canals from the western rivers. Such generosity is unusual of an upper riparian. Having been signed off on,the water sharing for all purposes stands settled.
What is disputable today has nothing to do with water sharing but to whether the Indian projects on the western rivers conform to the technical stipulations. Storages on rivers indeed create anxiety for lower riparian states and India,as an upper riparian,cannot disregard such concerns about water supply. However,it must be noted that there is not a single storage dam that India has built on the western rivers even though the IWT allows storage entitlement of up to 3.6 MAF (million acre feet). The 33 projects India has undertaken,of which 14 are in operation and 13 under construction and the remaining either at the proposal stage or deferred,are run-of-the-river with a capacity of 10 MW or less. Each project,in accordance with the IWT,requires India to provide specified information to Pakistan at least six months before the commencement of the works. Clearly the question of India acquiring capacity to manipulate or withhold the flow of water is,under the IWTs provisions,not only untenable but can be monitored.
This,however,does not mean that Pakistan is not using the water issue to drum up hysteria over Indian regional hegemony and there are good reasons why the propaganda machinery works overtime. Pakistan receives 67 per cent of international waters,making it a boxed-in-lower-riparian not only with India but also with Afghanistan vis-a-vis the Kabul river. It articulates its vulnerability and victimhood by raising water as a lifeline issue,suggesting clearly that the sharing of the waters with India still remains unfinished business. A section of Pakistans political-military leadership,given its feudal and industrial background,believes that the water issues not only help divert attention from Pakistans inefficient water management policies and inter-provincial water dispute between Punjab and Sindh but would also provide a back door for international involvement,once again,in the Jammu and Kashmir dispute.
The raison detre of the IWT was precisely to delink the water issue from territorial disputes and settle any differences within the mechanism of the Permanent Indus Commission. By linking the waters to Kashmir,Pakistan is trying to reframe the water discourse through territoriality. Pakistan needs to understand that India has been far more open to talks and concessions on water issues than territory. In the case of the Salal dam and Tulbul navigation project,India conceded to Pakistans demands by making structural changes to the former and suspending work on the latter,having suffered excessive siltation thereon. The only possible way Pakistan can secure its long-term water requirements is to engage with India on water needs.
Remarkably,the means to overcome some of the predicted water woes between India and Pakistan are in the IWT itself. Article VII opens up a range of possibilities for future cooperation through common interest in optimum development of the rivers and undertaking engineering works on the rivers. This will require a new set of skills and approaches,but above all a radically different mindset. Issues such as food and energy will increasingly have intricate linkages to water while demographic pressures on water availability and climate change will critically impact water management. Since the Indus and Sutlej originate in Tibet,cooperation with China will at some point become necessary for purposes of data exchange on the flows,especially with evidence of permafrost melting in Tibet.
The IWT has shown that water-related interests are not always incompatible. The treaty has worked and it does no one any good to disturb the equilibrium.
The writer is a research fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses,New Delhi
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