Review the Indus treaty

With the failure of the latest round of Indo-Pak talks on the Baglihar hydel power project on the Chenab river in Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan seems set to drag this protracted controversy to the World Bank for arbitration.

It was the World Bank which had brokered the Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan in 1960, apportioning the entire waters of the three eastern flowing rivers (Sutlej, Beas and Ravi) to India and the three western flowing rivers (Chenab, Jhelum and Indus) to Pakistan.

The treaty had, however, permitted India to build storage aggregating 3.60 million acre-feet on the three western rivers, besides a limited consumptive and total non-consumptive use of water.

As such, India is within its rights to use the Chenab water for hydel power production. Pakistan's fear that the project would result in reduced flow of water is without basis because the Baglihar project aims merely to use the run-off flow for power production.

It is amply clear that Pakistan's move to stall this project is based not so much on the technical flaws in the project structure as is made out to be, but on other motives.

Otherwise, its water ministry would not have obtained prior sanction from the country's exchequer for $ 12 million, needed for seeking the appointment of neutral experts without waiting for the outcome of the latest meeting on the issue.

In fact, Pakistan had also arbitrarily fixed December 31 as the deadline for stoppage of work on the project.

What makes this development rather unfortunate is not only the timing of the move (given the general thaw in bilateral relations) but also its implications.

This will also jeopardise some other on-going or proposed developmental projects, including the already stalled Tulbul project and the controversy-ridden Kisanganga project.

This apart, the launch of the Baglihar arbitration process is bound to raise many issues related to the Indus Water Treaty itself, threatening its survival in the present form.

From that point of view, such a move might even boomerang on Pakistan. From the Indian standpoint, a review of the treaty with the sole objective of revising it "" and not abrogating it "" is badly needed.

The original treaty suffered from several fundamental flaws. For one thing, it had only distributed the six common rivers between the two countries; it had not distributed water.

In fact, basic parameters like the water flows of each river, the potential for their gainful exploitation and the requirement of the river basin population were not given the attention that was needed.

Moreover, in the past four decades, the water demands of different users, including agriculture, industry and domestic sectors, have vastly changed.

So has, of course, the available technology for exploiting water flows without reducing the volumes of these flows.

All these factors point to the need for correcting past mistakes and working out a new and more realistic version of the Indus Water Treaty to replace the current one.