Futile water wars

Pak will achieve nothing with its anti-India campaign on water

As was to be expected, the three-day Indo-Pak water talks in New Delhi last week failed to deliver any positive outcome. Pakistan had raised the pitch on the water issue in recent months, and it was not about to lower it after a routine meeting of the Permanent Indus Water Commission. Admittedly, the Pakistan delegation when in India did indicate a mellowing of its objections to some of the proposed hydro-power projects in Jammu and Kashmir. But, once back home, it harped again on alleged non-compliance by India with the Indus Water Treaty of 1960. It is also apparent that Pakistan has not learnt any lessons from the dispute over the Baglihar project, on which it sought neutral arbitration but received an adverse verdict. Otherwise, it would not have threatened to move for international arbitration on other projects in Jammu and Kashmir. Apart from the Kishenganga project, these include the 240 Mw Uri II project on the Jhelum and the Chutak and Nimoo Bazgo projects on tributaries of the Indus. All these are run-of-the river projects (i.e. without involving storage or diversion of water), in advanced stages of implementation.

 

The Indus treaty allows India to create water storage capacity of 3.6 million acre feet (MAF) on the three west-flowing rivers — Indus, Jhelum and Chenab — allocated to Pakistan. India has so far not built even a fraction of this storage. Also, much of the permitted 1.34 million acres of irrigation capacity is yet to be tapped. If any country has the right to complain, it should be India because the Indus treaty was based on the fundamentally flawed premise of dividing the rivers between the two countries, rather than distributing their waters. The three rivers given to Pakistan accounted for nearly 80 per cent of the total annual water flows of all the six rivers emanating from the Kashmir region and flowing to different parts of the sub-continent. India on its part has made this imbalance worse by failing to create the capacity to use or store the waters in the rivers allotted to it, so that Pakistan is also receiving the surplus flows of water in the three eastern rivers allocated exclusively to India.

Pakistan has mismanaged its water economy even more than India. It receives an annual average of 139 MAF of water, which should be enough to meet its genuine needs. But its lower riparian state, Sindh, is deprived of adequate water due largely to the usurping of a larger-than-due share of water by the politically and militarily dominant state of Punjab. There is also mismanagement of water in Pakistan’s extensive but dilapidated canal network. Pakistan needs to realise, therefore, that escalation of tension with India on the water issue will achieve nothing, and could even prove counter-productive.