LAHORE - Water expert engineer Suleman Najib Khan on Wednesday said that the long-standing water dispute between Pakistan and India can be resolved in an amicable manner through the Indus Water Treaty (IWT), if India understands the significance Pakistan being the lower riparian and unable to control its water supplies. He expressed these views at a seminar on Pak-India Water and Trade arranged by India-Pakistan Soldiers Initiative for Peace (IPSI) at Gymkhana Club. Khan expressed the concern that India had built dams on Pakistani river waters emanating from Indian side of Kashmir including Chenab, Indus and Jehlum Rivers in violation of the IWT. “We have no feature on Chenab to build a dam but you (India) are operating dams, thus having full control to hold Pakistani water even for a month, and this matter needs serious attention of the Indian government,” he said. He said since India had been the upper riparian, it had the full control and advantage of water than the lower riparian, Pakistan. He stressed upon India to share equitably, fairly, amicably and honestly the waters of the three rivers upon which Pakistan had perpetual right under Indus Water Treaty, signed between the two countries in 1960. Khan said Pakistan could not build more reservoirs, as most of Pakistan’s financial resources were directed at curbing terrorism and extremism. Furthermore, he said that Pakistan’s population has now increased up to three times since 1974, while, its water storage capacity has reduced to a mere 8 percent while the ground water level is lowering due to global warming. Moreover, he said that Pakistan has been losing hydropower worth 60 billion dollars following spoilage of water in the absence of reservoirs every year. He said, “you (India) share with us the boundaries of Indus Basin to keep Pakistan’s agriculture alive. You may go further with trade and technology but if you just give us a space in agriculture, it will eliminate terrorism and extremism from Pakistan.” Later, the Indian delegation head Muti Dhaar said India wanted total stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan, adding that India was financially assisting Afghanistan for development of its sectors of education, health, power and infrastructure. Muti Dhaar said that though India has constructed dams on Pakistani waters, it has ensured that water was not held during cultivation season in Pakistan. However, he said, “I assure you, we will do what can be possible for us for better and strong relations between the two neighboring countries.”
Water Dispute Increases India-Pakistan Tension
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
The Kishenganga dam project in Kashmir is a crucial part of India’s plans to feed its rapidly growing but power-starved economy.
BANDIPORE, Kashmir — In this high Himalayan valley on the Indian-controlled side of Kashmir, the latest battle line between India and Pakistan has been drawn.
Laborers who work long hours in Bandipore said the work is not merely a matter of electricity. National pride is at stake, they said.
This time it is not the ground underfoot, which has been disputed since the bloody partition of British India in 1947, but the water hurtling from mountain glaciers to parched farmers’ fields in Pakistan’s agricultural heartland.
Indian workers here are racing to build an expensivehydroelectricdam in a remote valley near here, one of several India plans to build over the next decade to feed its rapidly growing but power-starved economy.
In Pakistan, the project raises fears that India, its archrival and the upriver nation, would have the power to manipulate the water flowing to its agriculture industry — a quarter of its economy and employer of half its population. In May it filed a case with the international arbitration court to stop it.
Water has become a growing source of tension in many parts of the world between nations striving for growth. Several African countries are arguing over water rights to the Nile. Israel and Jordan have competing claims to the Jordan River. Across the Himalayas, China’s own dam projects have piqued India, a rival for regional, and even global, power.
With their populations rapidly expanding, water is critical to both nations. Pakistan contains the world’s largest contiguous irrigation system, water experts say. It has also become an increasingly fertile recruiting ground for militant groups, who play on a lack of opportunity and abundant anti-India sentiment. The rivers that traverse Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province and the heart of its agriculture industry, are the country’s lifeline, and the dispute over their use goes to the heart of its fears about its larger, stronger neighbor.
For India, the hydroprojects are vital to harnessing Himalayan water to fill in the serious energy shortfalls that crimp its economy. About 40 percent of India’s population is off the power grid, and lack of electricity has hampered industry. The Kishenganga project is a crucial part of India’s plans to close that gap.
if the Kishenganga dam is allowed under the treaty, the dispute is over how it should be built and the timely release of water. Pakistan contends that having the drainage at the very base of the dam will allow India to manipulate the water flow when it wants, for example, during a crucial period of a planting season.
“It makes Pakistan very vulnerable,” said a lawyer who has worked on past water cases for Pakistan. “You can’t just tell us, ‘Hey, you should trust us.’ We don’t. That’s why we have a treaty.”
India has rejected any suggestion that it has violated the treaty or tried to steal water. In a speech on June 13, India’s foreign secretary, Nirupama Rao, called such allegations “breast-beating propaganda,” adding “the myth of water theft does not stand the test of rational scrutiny or reason.”
Water experts concur, but say Pakistan does have a legitimate cause for concern. The real issue is timing. If India chooses to fill its dams at a crucial time for Pakistan, it has the potential to ruin a crop. Mr. Briscoe estimates that if India builds all its planned projects, it could have the capacity of holding up about a month’s worth of river flow during Pakistan’s critical dry season, enough to wreck an entire planting season.
Pakistanis say they have reason to be worried. In 1948, a year after Pakistan and India were established as states, an administrator in India shut off the water supply to a number of canals in Pakistani Punjab. Indian authorities later said it was a bureaucratic mix-up, but in Pakistan, the memory lingers.
A genuine water shortage in Pakistan, and the country’s inability to store large quantities of water, has only made matters worse, exposing it to any small variation in rainfall or river flow. Pakistan is about to slip into a category of country the United Nations defines as“water scarce.”
“They are confronting a very serious water issue,” said a senior American official in Islamabad. “There’s a high amount of anxiety, and it’s not misplaced.”
The design of the dam requires that much of the water in the Kishenganga River be diverted for much of the year. That will kill off fish and harm the livelihoods of the people living in the Pakistan-administered side of Kashmir, Pakistani officials say.
In a country where summer temperatures reach 120 degrees, as much as 40 percent of Pakistan’s water is lost before even reaching the roots of the plants, experts say.
Construction
work under progress on the bank of Tawi River in the northern Indian
city of Jammu, the winter capital of Kashmir on 21 February 2011
India's Wular Lake, a popular picnic and tourist spot nestled
in the Kashmir Valley, is an unlikely site for conflict. But India's
plan to build a structure on the Jhelum River at the mouth of the lake
that will allow it to release water during the river's lean winter
months has outraged neighboring Pakistan, which believes the project
will give India the power to control how much water flows downstream to
its farmers. After two and a half decades of deadlock and 15 marathon
rounds of bilateral talks — the most recent occurring in late March —
the countries appear a long way from finding common ground.
The countries' early leaders anticipated this fierce rivalry over the
waters that straddle their volatile border. Following protracted and
painstaking negotiations, they signed an accord in 1960 called the Indus
Waters Treaty that determined exactly how the region's rivers are to be
divided. In the treaty, control over the three "eastern" rivers — the
Beas, Ravi and Sutlej — was given to India and the three "western"
rivers — the Indus, Chenab and Jhelum — to Pakistan. More controversial,
however, were the provisions on how the waters were to be shared. Since
Pakistan's rivers flow through India first, the treaty allowed India to
use them for irrigation, transport and power generation, while laying
down precise do's and don'ts for Indian building projects along the way.
The treaty has been widely hailed as a success, having survived three
post-independence wars between the hostile nuclear neighbors. But its
resilience is increasingly being tested by challenges thrown up by the
21st century. For one, Pakistan is on the brink of water scarcity. Its
once-lush agricultural fields, which employ half of all Pakistanis and
account for a quarter of its GDP, are now frequently parched.In Pakistan, which is deeply
distrustful of its larger and more powerful neighbor, the country's
crippling water shortage is seen as a direct result of India's upstream
dams and water projects.
Indeed, India has ramped up its hydroelectricity projects in recent
years to try to boost its woefully inadequate power supplies. The
government has a total of 45 projects either already completed or in the
proposal stage on the western rivers, some as large as 1000 megawatt
and many as small as 2 and 3 megawatt. This expansion has irked
Islamabad. "India is putting more and more restrictions and
constrictions on Pakistan's waters," Kamal Majidulla, Pakistani Prime
Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani's special assistant on water resources and
agriculture, tells TIME.
The countries have already been embroiled in two high-profile legal
fights over water. In 2005, Pakistan challenged India's 450-megawatt
Baglihar dam before a World Bank-appointed neutral expert and lost. And
last year, the countries went head to head at the International Court of
Arbitration over India's 330-megawatt Kishanganga project in Jammu and
Kashmir. The court has ordered India to temporarily stop some
constructions on the dam while assessments are being made. Pakistan is
also considering arbitration to iron out differences over another dam —
the Nimoo Bazgo — on the Indus.
Few believe India and
Pakistan will actually go to war over the disputes, but one thing is for
certain: water is making it harder for the long-time rivals to put
their enmity behind them.
India's new dams threaten Pakistan's farming sector
Brig Shaukat Qadir
What has happened since to create a
situation that verges on disaster? In the original treaty, India
retained the right to construct hydro-electric power generating projects
on the western rivers. Even though those rivers were allocated to
Pakistan, the theory was that hydro-electric generation would not
materially affect the flow of water. However, mindful of the fact that
India could manipulate the timing of the flow of water, the original
treaty restricted the amount of "live storage" - the water stored in a
reservoir that can affect the river's flow.
Crucially, spillway
gates were prohibited on all of India's projects on the western rivers,
which could control the timing of the flow of water. Then in the 1990s,
India proposed the Baglihar Hydroelectric Power Project in the disputed
state of Jammu and Kashmir. The Baglihar dam straddled the Chenab River
and Pakistan objected on the grounds that, among other things, the
project violated the 1960 treaty because it included spillway gates.
India's very reasonable counter-argument was that the dam would silt up
without these gates.
The World Bank, which had been a party to the
original treaty, appointed a Swiss civil engineer to arbitrate the
technical aspects. In 2007, the engineer released his findings. While
modifying some of the project's design, he found technically that
India's argument was sound and ruled in its favour as far as the
spillway gates were concerned. As a result, Pakistan lost its single
assurance that India would not manipulate the flow of water. And, now
that it had the capability, India used it. To quote a recent article by
John Briscoe, a former senior adviser to the World Bank who has worked
on water issues on the subcontinent for 35 years: "This vulnerability
was driven home when India chose to fill Baglihar exactly at the time
when it would impose maximum harm on farmers in downstream Pakistan."
As the article War or peace on the Indus
pointed out, by manipulating the flow of water earlier this year, India
adversely affected Pakistan's summer crop. What is more, this is not
the only dam under construction in Indian Kashmir or the rest of India
on the western rivers of Jehlum and Chenab. Kishanganga, Sawalkot,
Pakuldul, Bursar, Dal Huste, Gyspa - the list of dam projects goes on
and on. "The cumulative live storage will be large, giving India an
unquestioned capacity to have major impact on the timing of flows into
Pakistan," Mr Briscoe writes. "If, God forbid, India so chose, it could
use this cumulative live storage to impose major reductions on water
availability in Pakistan during the critical planting season."
Given
an ideal situation, I agree with Mr Briscoe that the treaty between the
two countries is still workable. But now Pakistan is entirely dependent
on Indian good will. Already the water shortage in the Chenab during
the planting season this year forced Pakistani Punjab to seek to
re-route the Indus River water to ensure full agricultural production.
The province of Sindh disagreed and, since in the domestic division of
water between the provinces of Pakistan Sindh has primacy over the
waters of Indus, Punjab had to give in.
there is a strong case for Pakistan to
urgently re-negotiate the entire Indus Water Treaty. At the minimum, the
agreement should include international monitoring systems as safeguards
against misuse of the dam modifications that are now permitted to
India.
In an ideal world, we would hope India would not
deliberately cause Pakistan's agriculture any unnecessary harm. No one,
however, could argue that India and Pakistan's relations are ideal in
any way. Brig Shaukat Qadir is a retired Pakistani infantry officer.
Dr. Ijaz Hussain November 24, 2012
Pakistani
President Mohammad Ayub Khan and Indian Prime Minister Jawahar Lal
Nehru sign the Indus Water Treaty, September 16, 1960
The Treaty worked
more or less satisfactorily over the years, even during the 1965 and
1971 wars. However, since its rise as an economic power, India has
started to flex its muscle and begun abusing the Treaty by planning huge
dam-like structures on the Western Rivers. It has already built one on
the Chenab River called the Baglihar dam and is currently building
another one on the Jhelum River called the Kishanganga dam.
LOCATION OF PROJECTS ON RIVER INDUS
Pakistan’s concern about the issue is evident
from the fact that according to the Strategic Foresight Group, an
Indian think tank, every proposal that Pakistan has made since 1999 in
the two-track diplomacy has focused on water as a matter of pivotal
concern to that country. The gravity of the situation can be gauged from
the fact that in March 2009, a group of more than 20 different UN
bodies warned that given the rising tension over the water issue between
Pakistan and India, the world could be perilously close to its first
water war.
LOCATION OF COMMISSIONED PROJECTS ON RIVER JHELUM
The question arises: why is India bent upon building these dams? Is it
doing so merely to generate electricity or is there some hidden agenda
behind it as well? From all the available evidence, it is clear that
India is trying to acquire capability to control the waters of the
Western Rivers in order to release them to inundate Pakistani territory
or withhold them to render it dry at an opportune moment.Independent
and neutral observers tend to agree with Pakistan’s assessment. For
example, this is what John Brisco, Professor of Environmental
Engineering at the Harvard University, who has worked on the issue for
quite some time, has to say in the matter:
LOCATION OF PROJECTS ON RIVER INDUS
“[There] is a veritable caravan of Indian projects-Kishanganga,
Sawalkot, Pakuldul, Bursar, Dal Huste, Gypsa. The cumulative live
storage would be large, giving India an unquestioned capacity to have
major impact on the timing of flows into Pakistan… [Calculations
suggest] that once it has constructed all of the hydropower plants on
the Chenab, India will have ability to effect major damage on Pakistan.”
Incidentally, if India is trying to control the flow of the Western
Rivers, its attitude has been no different towards its other South Asian
neighbours. It has succeeded in imposing unfair water treaties like the
Mahakali and Tanakpur Agreements on Nepal and the Ganges Agreement of
1996 on Bangladesh. Additionally, it has plans to interlink Brahmaputra,
Ganges and Meghna rivers by transferring water from surplus to
deficient rivers which would hit Bangladesh hard as it would deprive the
latter of water which it has historically used. In this backdrop, the
Indian intentions vis-a-vis Pakistan through vast dam-building plans
become clear. It is not only to steal waters which rightfully belong to
Pakistan but also to use them as a weapon to reduce Pakistan to the
status of Nepal or Bangladesh. India is doing so because it is a
hegemonistic power which is bent upon imposing its version of the Monroe
doctrine on South Asia. It is making a strategic use of water to subdue
Pakistan which is the last line of resistance against India’s quest for
supremacy in South Asia.
India's dam plans anger Pakistan, symbolise global water woes
ITS three great basins - the Indus, the Ganges and the
Brahmaputra - are the most densely populated area in the world. The
Ganges alone supports half a billion people.
Seventy per cent of South Asia's 1.5 billion people live in
farming families, and depend on the water of those basins for their
survival. That number grows by 25 million every year.
For generations the rivers have watered the bread basket of
the Punjab, the cotton plants and fruit trees of the Sindh, and the rice
paddies of Bangladesh, and grown this region faster than anywhere else.
The issue of water in this part of the world is back in the
spotlight with a case before the Permanent Court of Arbitration this
week between Pakistan and India.
Pakistan claims a new hydroelectric plant India is building
on the Kishanganga River
A security report from the US Director of National
Intelligence released this year says that over the next decade ''many
countries … will experience water problems - shortages, poor water
quality, or floods - that will risk instability and state failure''.
''As a result of demographic and economic development
pressures, North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia will face major
challenges coping with water problems.''
Last year, Pakistani newspaper Nawa-i-Waqt urged the
government: ''Pakistan should convey to India that a war is possible on
the issue of water and this time war will be a nuclear one.''
Most experts argue a declared war between nations in the near future is unlikely, but as pressure grows, smaller conflicts will flare across the region.
The Strategic Foresight Group has postulated the idea of an
''arc of hydro insecurity'', stretching from Vietnam through China,
South Asia, to Iran, Iraq and other Middle East countries, through to
Egypt and Kenya in East Africa.
Scarce water will drive up food prices, destabilise governments and spark mass migrations.
A Dutch study found that by the middle of this century,
shrinking glaciers will reduce the flow of water to the Indus by 8 per
cent.
Environmental author B. G. Verghese told The Age :
''Water, and the energy that comes from water, affects every household.
If you have a 12-hour blackout, children cannot do their homework,
factories cannot operate. If the well is empty and the women have to
walk to the next village for water, mini water-wars break out between
villages, fighting over the last bucket.
''More people will be killed by insanitary water than by all
the sum total of all the wars and all the insurgencies that might be
fought.''
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