River water disputes are emerging as a major source of irritation between India and its neighbours. Identify the sources of conflicts and suggest the remedial measures. (2015, 15 Marks)
The Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra basins make the subcontinent one hydrological unit, and its agrarian, hydropower-hungry, fast-urbanising economies draw on the same rivers. India holds a double riparian position: upstream of Pakistan and Bangladesh, downstream of China, Nepal and Bhutan. Every principle it invokes in one basin can be turned against it in another.
Sources of conflict
Structural and hydrological
- Lean-season scarcity: the disputes are dry-season disputes, and rising farm, urban and industrial demand shrinks what can be shared.
- Upstream control: Partition left the Indus headworks in India, feeding Pakistan’s insecurity; Farakka’s diversion to the Hooghly (1975) hurt Bangladesh’s south-west; China’s Medog project (begun July 2025) makes India the anxious lower riparian.
Legal and institutional
- No regional regime: no South Asian state is party to the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention. Equitable utilisation and the no-harm rule pull apart, and nothing fills the gaps between bilateral treaties.
- Weak dispute settlement: the Ganga Treaty has no neutral expert or guarantee clause, and India has no water treaty with China. Its flood-data memoranda lapsed in 2020 and 2023; in August 2025 Beijing offered only emergency data on humanitarian principles.
Political
- Asymmetry and distrust: Nepal regards the Kosi (1954) and Gandak (1959) agreements as unequal; the Mahakali Treaty’s Pancheshwar project is unbuilt thirty years on and entangled with the Kalapani dispute.
- Federal constraint: West Bengal blocked the 2011 Teesta deal, and Bihar’s ruling party opposes renewing the Ganga Treaty, which expires in December 2026, in its present form.
- Securitisation: India placed the Indus Waters Treaty “in abeyance” on 23 April 2025. In an award dated 31 August 2026 the Court of Arbitration held that it “remains fully in force”; India rejected the ruling.
- Climate change: retreating glaciers and erratic monsoons undermine formulas built on old flow records.
Remedial measures
- Accept procedural duties without ratifying: prior notification, data exchange and consultation, which would also strengthen India’s case against China on Medog.
- Share benefits, not just volumes: B. G. Verghese’s Waters of Hope (1990) argued for basin-wide Himalayan storage and power development; the Bhutan hydropower model and Nepali power exports through India to Bangladesh (since November 2024) show it working. Claudia W. Sadoff and David Grey (2002) call this cooperation “beyond the river”.
- Adaptive treaties: a Ganga renewal with flow-indexed shares, environmental flows and a technical dispute mechanism; a storage-based Teesta deal.
- Consult the States early, as Jyoti Basu was in 1996.
- Desecuritise the Indus by keeping the Permanent Indus Commission’s data channel open while political ties stay frozen.
- Sub-regional groupings of willing states (BBIN) before basin-wide allocation.
Conclusion
Aaron T. Wolf’s studies of shared basins show that water more often produces treaties than wars. South Asia’s problem is weak, rigid and politicised instruments, not “water wars”. As both upper and lower riparian, India’s interest lies in rules it can apply consistently in both directions.