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Explained: What Does India Suspending the Indus Waters Treaty Mean?
The Wire Analysis
A day ago, after the Pahalgam attack in which 26 were killed and several injured, India announced that it would keep the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960 in abeyance with immediate effect.
How will India enforce the suspension of IWT?
India can do two things.
The first is to halt regulated water flow in the western rivers (Indus, Jhelum and Chenab) – stop releasing water from dams and hydroelectric projects on these rivers. While natural flow through these rivers will continue, regulated releases, which is critical for Pakistan’s irrigation and drinking water, could stop. For example, the Baglihar Dam on the Chenab could retain water, reducing downstream flow to Pakistan.
The second is that India could accelerate infrastructure development by fast-tracking storage projects on western rivers, such as the Pakal Dul (1,000 MW) and the Sawalkot (1,856 MW) dams on the Chenab. This would allow India to increase control over water flow in Chenab in the future.
In addition, technical meetings, data sharing, and dispute-resolution mechanisms under the IWT can be frozen. India will have to no longer notify Pakistan about water flow changes or project designs.
What is the difference between regulated and natural flow?
The difference between natural flow and regulated flow in the context of the IWT lies in whether the water’s movement is shaped by human intervention or left to follow its course as determined by nature. The IWT is designed to ensure that India’s regulation of the rivers does not deprive Pakistan of its rightful share of the natural flow.
Natural flow refers to the quantity of water that would pass through a river at a given point during a specific period if there were no human-made diversions, impoundments or regulation upstream. It includes direct runoff from precipitation, glacial melt, and groundwater seepage, unaffected by human infrastructure. This is the water that would reach Pakistan from the western rivers if India did not build dams, reservoirs or undertake any activity to alter the river’s course or volume.
Regulated flow is the movement of water that is controlled or managed through human-made structures such as dams, reservoirs, weirs and gates. It involves opening or closing valves, adjusting spillways, or releasing water from storage to control the timing and quantity of water downstream. Under the IWT, India is allowed to build certain hydroelectric and irrigation projects on the western rivers, but these must be “run-of-the-river” schemes. This means they can temporarily hold or divert water for power generation but must not significantly alter or reduce the total flow that is reaching Pakistan.
What is the allocation of water to Pakistan under the IWT?
In Indus, Jhelum and Chenab rivers, 135 million acre feet or MAF per year is allocated to Pakistan, but India can use them for unlimited run-of-the-river hydropower projects such as Baglihar Dam, for irrigation of up to 701,000 acres, and storage limited to 3.6 MAF. The treaty mandates real-time flow data exchange, but disputes arise when Pakistan accuses India of withholding water during critical periods, such as in the pre-sowing season.
The IWT allows India the development of 13.4 lakh acres of irrigation in Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. However, as of now, only 6.42 lakh acres are being irrigated in these Union Territories. Moreover, India only uses 90% of the 33 MAF it is allocated from the eastern rivers. The unutilised flow of 2 MAF from the Ravi and 5.5 MAF from the Sutlej/Beas systems has historically flowed to Pakistan due to incomplete infrastructure on the Indian side.
Which of these will get affected by the suspension of IWT?
The average annual flow of 135 MAF originates from glacial melt and monsoon rains, and will continue unaffected by treaty suspension. Regulated releases from India’s dams and barrages of around 3.6 MAF of storage capacity supplement natural flow during dry seasons. Suspending the treaty allows India to halt these releases, but little to no such storage infrastructure currently exists in Jammu and Kashmir for India to exercise that control. At best, only 1.5 MAF of this capacity can exist in the Baglihar Dam. India can only withhold water up to its developed storage capacity from the western rivers. This water can be temporarily held back during lean seasons but must eventually be released downstream. Without additional storage infrastructure, India cannot retain more water. Even if India builds out its full allowed storage (3.6 MAF), it could temporarily regulate and delay flows to Pakistan, especially during critical agricultural periods, but cannot permanently divert or consume this water.
The challenge for Pakistan is limited water storage capacity. Major dams such as Mangla and Tarbela have a combined live storage of just 14.4 MAF, a mere 10% of the country’s annual entitlement under the IWT. In times of reduced water flow or seasonal variability, this shortfall in storage leaves Pakistan acutely vulnerable.
Can it really hurt Pakistan?
The western rivers derive 60-70% of their flow from glacial melt and 30-40% from monsoon rains, which India cannot control. Even with suspended cooperation, 131.4 MAF of natural flow will continue reaching Pakistan annually. During monsoon season (July-September), flow in the three rivers exceeds 5,800 m³/s (cubic metre per second), making artificial restrictions ineffective. The immediate impact is thus hard to state, but the summer of 2025 could test Pakistan’s ability to manage reduced flow during crop-growing seasons.
It is in the long term that effects will be visible if India executes major projects and Pakistan does not demonstrate resilience. By developing storage infrastructure, India could gain permanent control over western rivers, compounding Pakistan’s water stress.
Finally, what does all this mean?
India’s ability to restrict water to Pakistan is constrained by natural hydrological cycles, infrastructure gaps, and treaty design rules. The vast majority of the Indus system’s water will continue to flow to Pakistan due to natural geography and treaty limitations, but with seasonal variations.
From the western rivers, while regulated flow (3.6 MAF) can be reduced to some extent, the majority of water reaching Pakistan (131.4 MAF) flows naturally and remains beyond India’s control. Full stoppage would require massive infrastructure investment by India.
(Courtesy: The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia, and M. K. Venu.)
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Why Putting Indus Waters Treaty ‘in Abeyance’ has been Counterproductive for India
Omair Ahmad
The Indus Waters Treaty signed by the World Bank, India and Pakistan in 1960 is often held up as one of the great successes of international cooperation. Despite two full scale wars in 1965 and 1971, as well as lesser conflicts such as Kargil, the treaty has remained in force. The success, though, is often misunderstood because most people know little about the details of the treaty. The bare fact of the matter is that there is no opt-out clause in this agreement. The treaty can be changed, and a new treaty can be negotiated with the consensus of both, India and Pakistan. However, no one party has the authority to change or stop the treaty on its own.
The government of India’s decision to put the “treaty in abeyance”, then, lacks any legal standing because there is no clause that gives either of the countries the power to do so.
Were Pakistan to challenge the issue in the International Court of Justice, India would lose – Pakistan has hinted at this by saying that it was putting the Simla Agreement of 1972, which mandates that India and Pakistan resolve issues bilaterally or by agreement through other means, into abeyance.
This is not the first time that the Modi regime has tried to use legally dubious means vis-à-vis the treaty. In August 2016, Pakistan had taken back its request, under the treaty, for a neutral expert to be appointed to deal with a difference between India and Pakistan on the Kishenganga-Ratle project. Instead, it asked for a Court of Arbitration (CoA) to resolve the dispute on the same.
In the language of the treaty, both dispute vs difference and neutral expert vs CoA invoke higher levels of challenge. It is unclear why the government of Pakistan took such a step, but before the World Bank could appoint a CoA, the Indian government asked it to appoint a neutral expert on the same dispute, in October 2016.
Since the treaty prohibits the appointment of a CoA on an issue if a neutral expert is examining the subject, India then argued it was illegal for Pakistan to ask for a CoA or the World Bank to appoint one until after the neutral expert was done with the subject. Unfortunately for the Indian government, the issue was sequencing and there is nothing in the treaty that forbids the appointing of a CoA and a neutral expert on the same issue, especially if the country that had made the request for a CoA had submitted its request first.
In fact, the bare text of the treaty does not allow the World Bank the freedom to refuse the request of a neutral expert or a CoA unless a neutral expert has already been appointed to look at the issue.
The World Bank tried for years to get the governments of India or Pakistan to figure a way out, and then when it became impossible for it to continue, it simply announced – much to the shock and horror of the Modi regime – that it would be appointing both, a CoA and a neutral expert, in October 2022.
Since then, the Indian government has railed against this decision saying it is not legal, and has received the added humiliation of having all its arguments rejected. It is taking part in the neutral expert process and boycotting the CoA one.
This begs the question, why has the Indian government now chosen to announce that it will violate the treaty?
Is India violating the Indus Waters Treaty?
It could be argued that treaties are not really enforceable, and national security interests should outweigh treaty considerations. After all, nobody is going to come to Islamabad or New Delhi and say, “Tut, tut, you naughty children, do what you promised.”
In fact, we can see this clearly with the Simla Agreement, which says that both countries will respect the security and territorial integrity of each other, and resolve everything peaceably. The number of incidents along the Line of Control, much less the attacks by militants, are innumerable.
That said, one of the reasons that the Indus Waters Treaty has continued is how easy it is to continue with it. India received huge investments for its water infrastructure in Punjab – turning it into the breadbasket of India – and in return all it had to promise is to allow the relatively free flow of water on the western rivers flowing into Pakistan – in other words, it did not have to build large reservoirs for dams on the rivers or divert their flows to any great degree.
The only people this really affected were the residents of Jammu & Kashmir on the Indian side. Lack of large reservoirs means that when water flow is low during the winter months, there is less ability to maintain electricity output in the dams in Kashmir, so Kashmiris suffer from limited electricity in the winter months when they need it the most.
Of course, the one iron truth of India and Pakistan is that no government has ever cared about the lives, living conditions or livelihoods of Kashmiris, so this was hardly a sacrifice.
But what national security interests are likely to be fulfilled by violating the treaty? First of all, India can only influence a miniscule amount of the water flow into Pakistan right now, most of it is from glacial melt, snow melt, and monsoon rains anyway. To do more, India would have to spend thousands of crores to build large storage dams over a period of decades, for no set purpose except to threaten Pakistan. For that kind of money, India could easily overhaul its military capabilities instead, and in much quicker time.
More importantly, the restriction of water to another country is a war crime, and if India starts building the infrastructure to commit war crimes it paints itself as a villain in a region where it is fighting a desperate rearguard action against Chinese domination. As a downstream riparian to China, it will hand all the cards to its northern neighbour if China decides it will build such dams too, something it has both the financial wherewithal to do, and the engineering capability to do so much quicker than India.
The worst part of it is that India pushes Pakistan very firmly into the embrace of militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) and extremists in the Pakistani security establishment.
Between 2010-15, I oversaw a number of water conferences between Indian and Pakistani experts, including a number of Kashmiris. These were greenlit by New Delhi and Islamabad because LeT’s founder, Hafiz Saeed, was going around trying to raise support by focussing on the Indus Waters and saying things like either water would flow or blood would flow. Sadly, in 2016, Modi said much the same when his regime started targeting the Indus Waters Treaty, and now, after the statement of it being put in “abeyance,” Bilawal Bhutto, one of Pakistan’s key mainstream leaders, has said something of the same.
Forcing mainstream political parties in Pakistan to adopt the rhetoric of militant groups is not in India’s security interests. This should not require much thought. Somehow, though, the sustained focus of the Modi regime to somehow attack the Indus Waters Treaty to pressurise Pakistan has resulted in the exact opposite – the pressure has led to greater hostility and a wider constituency for it than one that existed earlier.
None of this is to say that the Indus Waters Treaty was, or is, perfect. It was the sub-par version that India and Pakistan signed in 1960. Instead of a joint management of the Indus River Basin as originally envisaged, the treaty chose divorce, a last step of Partition. It ignored groundwater, ignored demographic changes (larger populations), quality of water (pollution), and climate change was not even an issue at that time.
The benefit India received for funding the massive water infrastructure in Punjab is long past, and what both India and Pakistan need is a massive investment in much more resilient and sustainable water infrastructure along the Indus River Basin – and for India, also along the Ganga, Brahmaputra, and multiple other rivers. Such investment will not come into a region primed for war between nuclear armed neighbours, with one hinting at building infrastructure for war crimes against another, and politicians across the region adopting the language of militant groups that traffic in terrorism.
The last decade of hostile action and legal chicanery against the Indus Waters Treaty by the Modi administration has not helped this come about, in fact it has resulted in a series of public humiliations and been massively counterproductive. The latest actions continue along a pathway of failure. It would be wise to find an off ramp.
(Omair Ahmad is an author. His last novel, Jimmy the Terrorist, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and won the Crossword Award. Courtesy: The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia, and M. K. Venu.)