As India and Pakistan move towards the welcome resumption of dialogue, New Delhi needs to factor in a new reality: More than Kashmir, it is the accusation that India is stealing water that is rapidly becoming the “core issue” in the Pakistani establishment’s narrative about bilateral problems.
Concern is growing in Pakistan that India is pursuing policies in an attempt to strangulate Pakistan by exercising control over the water flow of Pakistan’s rivers. The concern is most related to Pakistan’s agricultural sector, which would be greatly affected by the building of dams and by the external control of the waters of several rivers that flow into Pakistan. The issue has a layered complexity, as three of the rivers flow into Pakistan through the Indian portion of Jammu & Kashmir, the territory over which the two countries have waged multiple wars.
A group of more than 20 different UN bodies warned earlier this month that the world may be perilously close to its first water war. “Water is linked to the crises of climate change, energy and food supplies and prices, and troubled financial markets,” said the report. “Unless their links with water are addressed and water crises around the world are resolved, these other crises may intensify and local water crises may worsen, converging into a global water crisis and leading to political insecurity and conflict at various levels.”
With the per capita availability of water declining in Pakistan due to rising population and poor water management, there is a sense of an imminent water crisis. The problems are plenty-
- Groundwater is said to be under stress through over-exploitation
- River flows are reported to be diminishing
- Some rivers to be so polluted as to be no more than sewers
- Water supply in cities is reportedly intermittent and unreliable
In most years, the Indus barely makes it beyond the Kotri barrage in Sindh, leading to the ingress of sea water, the increase in soil salinity and the destruction of agriculture in deltaic districts like Thatta and Badin.
While this appears to be an internal problem in Pakistan, the popular refrain in the country seems to be that India is behind the problem. This is being echoed in the media, picked up by the jihadists, and acquiesced in at the official and expert levels through silence (or even aggravated by official statements). This is a new development. Until recently, there were criticisms of particular Indian projects on the western rivers as not compliant with the Treaty, but no accusations of ‘water theft’ by India.
Though Pakistan’s water woes predate recent hydroelectric projects like Baglihar in Jammu and Kashmir, jihadi organisations like the Lashkar-e-Taiba/Jamaat-ud-Dawa have started blaming India for the growing shortage of water. Apart from inflaming public opinion against India, this propaganda helps to blunt the resentment Sindh and Balochistan have traditionally had — as the lowest riparians in the Indus river basin — against West Punjab for drawing more than its fair share of the water flowing through the provinces.
Pakistan blames India, saying it is withholding millions of cubic feet of water upstream on the Chenab in Indian-administered Kashmir and storing it in the massive Baglihar dam in order to produce hydro-electricity. Its Indian neighbour, Pakistan declares, is in breach of a 1960 treaty designed to administer water use in the region. After initial talks to try and resolve the issue, the matter has been put on hold since the Mumbai attacks last November in which 165 people were killed, fuelling tensions between the two quarrelsome neighbours.
How did this accusation come about? The answer is that some studies reportedly indicate a reduction in the flows in the western rivers, and it seems to be readily assumed that if the flows show a reduction, the upper riparian must have reduced them. India would say that if there are reductions in flows, they cannot forthwith be attributed to Indian action.
Also, Pakistan continues to be uncomfortable about Indian projects on the western rivers despite the many stringent safeguards provided by the Treaty to protect Pakistan against certain perceived dangers. Pakistan wants the Treaty to give the exclusive use of the western rivers with no provision whatever for even limited use by India; but such a Treaty might not have been signed by India. But, what with the permissive and restrictive provisions in the Treaty, and the density of technical detail in it, the situation in the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC) has turned adverse, leading to a constant tug of war, instead of constructive cooperation.
Also Pakistan is worried about the number of projects that India is planning on the western rivers. This is because, even with strict compliance with the provisions of the Treaty in each case, India might, taking all the projects together, acquire a measure of control over the waters of the western rivers and might potentially be able to inflict harm on Pakistan.
Pakistan believes that India might be planning a hundred projects. There seems to be no basis for that number. It is more likely that India might have in mind some thirty projects or so. It is not clear whether all those projects will in fact be undertaken, but assuming that they are, it is necessary to consider whether all of them will together give India a greater degree of control; enable large storage; make it possible for India to withhold water from Pakistan, or release stored waters and flood Pakistan. India claims that most of these will be small projects, which are run-of-the-river projects. Given the restrictive provisions of the Treaty, there is hardly any scope either for the retention of waters to the detriment of the lower riparian or for flooding the lower riparian; and that assuming that India wants to harm Pakistan it can do so only by openly violating the Treaty and by first harming itself, its own people, and its own projects (built at great cost).
Islamabad should also not doubt India’s plan to put up projects that do not impede water flows on the western rivers, because Article III of the IWT allows it the use of western river waters for domestic, non-consumptive and agriculture purposes, besides the generation of electricity.
Though the treaty has a mechanism to ensure compliance with the stipulated partitioning of rivers, a major weakness from Pakistan’s standpoint is that it does not compel or require India to do anything on its side for the optimum development of what is, after all, an integrated water system. Inflows to Pakistan depend not just on rainfall and snowmelt in India and China (the uppermost eastern riparian) but also on the health of tributaries, streams, nullahs and acquifers as well as groundwater, soil and forest management practices. This is a classic externality problem. Costs incurred by the upper riparian on responsible watershed management will produce disproportionate benefits for the lower riparian, hence they are not incurred.
Under the treaty, India is allowed to store 3.6 million acreage feet (MAF) of water of the western rivers, but it has not built any such facility so far, allowing unimpeded flows into Pakistan. Since the water level in the Chenab varies wildly during winter and summer, a better strategy would be for both countries to build a joint storage project which would serve the farmers of both countries during the lean periods, some experts aver.
Pakistan might consider the following two points as harmful.
- The initial filling of the Baglihar reservoir, and
- The planned diversion of Kishenganga waters
The first was a very minor and relatively innocuous matter which was blown up into a huge controversy. The issue has been closed at the last meeting of the PIC. The Kishenganga diversion, which Pakistan considers to be a violation of the Treaty and India holds to be specifically permitted by the Treaty, is going to the Court of Arbitration.
The fact that river flows from India to Pakistan have slowly declined is borne out by data on both sides. Above Merala on the Chenab, for example, the average monthly flows for September have nearly halved between 1999 and 2009. India claims that this is because of reduced rainfall and snowmelt. Pakistan refutes, preferring to link observable reductions in flows to hydroelectric projects on the Indian side. That is why, in the run-up to the February 25 meeting of the Indian and Pakistani Foreign Secretaries, Islamabad has gone out of its way to project water as the most important topic it intends to raise.
The reality of the partition
Though inter-provincial disputes over water sharing were a fact of life in this region before 1947, the partition of the subcontinent introduced a further complexity. It was easy for Radcliffe to draw a line on a map and divide up the land of British India but people and water were harder to partition. The rupture to the region’s hydrological system proved to be traumatic. The rivers which irrigated the new nation all had their origins in India. But as an upper riparian locked in a politically adversarial relationship with Pakistan, the Indian side had little or no incentive to look at the Indus basin as an integrated water system. The early years of independence saw bitter disputes as India treated the waters of the Indus’s five tributaries — Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej — as its own. Geography and terrain meant the Indus itself could not be harnessed on the Indian side of Jammu and Kashmir but intermittent, small-scale, diversions on the tributaries generated considerable tension with Pakistan. In 1960, the two countries sought to put an end to this tension by signing the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) with the World Bank’s mediation.
The IWT partitioned the six rivers of the Indus watershed on a crudely longitudinal basis. India was given exclusive use of the waters of the three eastern tributaries, the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, and the right to “non-consumptive” use of the western rivers, namely the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab. Under the IWT, India renounced its right to block or divert the flows of the ‘western’ rivers and agreed to confine itself to run-of-the-river hydroelectric projects and the drawing of irrigation water for a specified acreage of farm land. This partitioning was irrational from an ecological standpoint and led to both sides incurring considerable expense as they were forced to develop canal infrastructure drawing on “their” allocated rivers to compensate for the non-use of the other side’s rivers despite that water flowing through their own territory.
Pakistani officials keep accusing India of violating the 1960 treaty on the division of the Indus waters. The Indian side, of course, denies this, and there is, in any case, a system of international mediation built into the IWT for binding international arbitration if the two countries cannot resolve a water-related dispute. Pakistan invoked this mechanism for Baglihar in 2005, though the arbitrator ruled in favour of the project subject to certain modifications. An earlier dispute over the Salal project was resolved in the 1970s by the two Foreign Secretaries.
Many of the disputes that seem to be driven by fears of water scarcity are actually a reflection of another kind of scarcity: electricity. Pakistan opposes the Indian Kishenganga hydel project on the Jhelum, for example, because it will interfere with its proposed Neelum-Jhelum power plant. But if the two countries could build trust in one another, there is no reason why they cannot agree on energy swaps that could do away with the need to duplicate power projects, especially those which restrict the flow of water. Today, given the way terrorism has eroded the Indian political system’s capacity and willingness to do business with Pakistan, such ideas seem hopelessly utopian. But they do offer a glimpse of the kind of future that might be possible should the terrorist menace end. Rather than refusing to talk water, India should show Pakistan how the keys to ending its aquatic insecurities lie in its own hands.
In fact, Islamabad’s desire to bring the water issue on the table on the eve of this week’s foreign secretary talks is a change from its stand in 2002, when the “Pakistan Water Sector Strategy” argued for thwarting any “attempt by India” to scrap the treaty. It anticipated an adverse impact on the river water flows if the treaty was scrapped and argued for building storage capacities to meet requirements in times of shortages, which Pakistan has failed to do adequately.
Silting at dams
Pakistan’s problems are compounded by silting at the Tarbela and Mangla dams, with an internal official assessment admitting that it has lost 32 per cent of its storage capacity due to the problem.
While framing the IWT, the irrigable area of India and Pakistan was assessed at 26 million acres and 39 million acres respectively, while the waters available to them are 32.8 MAF and 135.6 MAF respectively. This means that only about 1.26 feet of water is available to India for its agriculture on eastern rivers, while about 3.5 feet of water is available to Pakistan for its agriculture.
Unused water
Pakistan has a large surplus of unused water. Its documents show about 30 MAF as “available surplus” with a very high escapage to the sea. Pakistan’s irrigation efficiency is also understood to be low, at an estimated 40 per cent. Virtually all of the municipal and industrial wastewater is returned to the rivers, nullahs and streams untreated, which results in deterioration of water quality.
The Pakistan document also suggests that canal capacities are not sufficient to provide the share of each province as per their allocation. The inefficient system aggravates the problems.
As a result of the IWT, Pakistan was assisted by India financially (£62.06 million) and by the IBRD fund to build replacement works, including link canals for transferring waters of the western rivers to eastern rivers. This network of link canals could be used by Pakistan to properly distribute the water.
Pakistan believes that the diversion of Neelum waters is not allowed under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, as it will cause a 27 per cent water deficit, when the project is completed. The reduced water flow in the Neelum would not yield the required results of the proposed 1.6 billion dollars Neelum-Jehlum hydropower project that has been designed to generate 969 MW of electricity. It said that India has almost completed a 22-kilometre long tunnel to divert Kishanganga waters to Wullar Lake in Jammu and Kashmir.
President Obama’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke has said Washington is in consultations with India and Pakistan to help both countries resolve water disputes between them.
In an interview with a private television channel, Holbrooke termed Pakistan’s water crisis as the second most worry for that country after its sagging economy. “Pakistan’s water crisis is the second most dangerous crisis after its economic turmoil,” The Daily Times quoted Holbrooke, as saying.
The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), inked between India and Pakistan in 1960, provides appointment of a neutral expert by the World Bank as a last option to resolve water related issues between both the countries.
Unless both countries can arrive at a compromise where the dispute is concerned, analysts fear that this problem might lead to a terrible Indo – Pakistan war.
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