Comment: Indus water Treaty. (1991, 20 Marks)
Partition gave India the headworks and Pakistan the canal lands of the world’s largest contiguous irrigation system. When a standstill arrangement lapsed in April 1948, India briefly cut off supplies. In 1951 David E. Lilienthal proposed treating the basin as a single engineering unit, and the World Bank under Eugene R. Black took up the mediation. Nine years later, on 19 September 1960, Jawaharlal Nehru and Ayub Khan signed the Indus Waters Treaty at Karachi. The Bank also signed it, a third-party role rare in India–Pakistan instruments.
What the treaty provides
- Partition, not sharing: the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej) went to India for unrestricted use, and the western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) to Pakistan. By volume the split is roughly 20:80.
- Indian rights on the western rivers (Article III and Annexures C and D): domestic and non-consumptive use, limited irrigation, and run-of-the-river hydropower under strict limits on pondage, spillways and intakes.
- Transition: India contributed to Pakistan’s replacement works, including the Mangla and Tarbela dams, built through a Bank-led fund.
- Institutions: a Permanent Indus Commission (Article VIII) to exchange data and carry out inspections, and a graded dispute ladder (Article IX). Questions go to the Commission, technical differences to a Neutral Expert, and interpretive disputes to a Court of Arbitration.
- Permanence: only a new ratified treaty can modify or end it (Article XII); there is no exit clause.
Why it is significant
- Durability: the Commission kept meeting through the wars of 1965 and 1971, and later through Kargil. Aaron T. Wolf’s studies of shared basins find cooperation far more common than conflict; Undala Z. Alam (2002) explains the Indus case by “water rationality”, each side needing assured supply too much to gamble with it.
- A functional bargain: in the spirit of David Mitrany’s functionalism, technical cooperation was insulated from high politics.
- It worked: rulings on Baglihar (2007) and Kishenganga (2013) were implemented.
Its limits and critics
- Indian critics: Nehru conceded the larger share; Jammu and Kashmir’s Assembly sought a review in 2003, saying the state was denied its own rivers. Defenders reply that India got the rivers it could control.
- Pakistani critics: every Indian dam on the western rivers is seen as a lever over sowing-time flows; water is securitised in Pakistani politics.
- Outdated design: it is silent on climate change, glacial melt, groundwater and environmental flows, and predates the Helsinki Rules (1966) and the UN Watercourses Convention (1997) on equitable use.
- Separation is not cooperation: Ramaswamy R. Iyer, a former Water Resources Secretary, called it a partitioning treaty rather than a sharing one, so there was never joint basin management.
Where it stands
The Kishenganga–Ratle dispute produced parallel tracks in 2022: a Neutral Expert, whose January 2025 ruling on his competence India welcomed, and a Court of Arbitration that India boycotts. After notices seeking modification (2023, 2024), India held the treaty “in abeyance” on 23 April 2025, the day after the Pahalgam attack. In an award dated 31 August 2026 the Court held unanimously that the treaty “remains fully in force” and restricted concreting at the Ratle dam pending the Neutral Expert. India rejected it as the work of an illegally constituted court. Lacking storage to cut flows, India has in practice stopped data-sharing, inspections and Commission meetings.
Conclusion
The treaty is the most successful India–Pakistan agreement because it kept water outside the rivalry. Its weakness is that this separation depends on political will, which the treaty itself cannot guarantee. A revised treaty that adds climate adaptation and data-sharing would serve both riparians better than either abeyance or a frozen 1960 text.