India's River Treaties Are Unravelling. Millions Will Pay the Price.

The Indus Waters Treaty, signed in 1960 and brokered by the World Bank, survived three Indo-Pakistani wars, nuclear standoffs, and countless border skirmishes. It is widely considered one of the most successful water-sharing agreements in history. It is also, quietly but unmistakably, falling apart. India announced in January 2023 that it would invoke dispute resolution mechanisms for the fifth time in a decade—this time over Pakistan's objections to the Kishanganga and Ratle hydroelectric projects. Pakistan responded by refusing to accept the appointment of a neutral expert, effectively paralysing the treaty's enforcement provisions. Meanwhile, the Ganges Water Sharing Treaty with Bangladesh, renewed reluctantly in 1996 for 30 years, is now being openly questioned by officials in Delhi who argue that climate change has made its provisions obsolete. What was once the diplomatic architecture of regional stability is now a source of instability itself.

This matters because roughly 900 million people depend on the Indus and Ganges river systems for drinking water, irrigation, and power. When treaties break down, the consequences are not abstract. They are measured in failed harvests, darkened cities, and mass displacement. And unlike in 1960, when the Indus Treaty was signed, the rivers themselves are changing. Glacial melt in the Himalayas has accelerated. Monsoon patterns have become erratic. Annual flow in the Indus has declined by approximately 16% since 2000, according to the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources. The treaties were designed for predictable hydrology. That world no longer exists.

The Numbers

The Indus treaty allocated the three western rivers—Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab—to Pakistan, and the three eastern rivers—Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej—to India. For decades this division worked, in part because both countries had limited capacity to build large infrastructure. That changed in the 2000s. India has constructed or planned at least 33 hydroelectric projects on the western rivers, all technically permitted under the treaty's provisions for "run-of-the-river" projects that do not consume or divert water. Pakistan argues that these dams give India the ability to regulate flow and therefore violate the treaty's spirit, if not its letter. India counters that it is entitled to generate power and that Pakistan's objections are politically motivated.

The reality is more complex. The treaty was designed in an era when water was abundant and infrastructure was limited. Today, both assumptions have reversed. The Indus basin is classified as "water-stressed" by the Asian Development Bank, with per capita availability in Pakistan dropping below 1,000 cubic metres per year—the international threshold for water scarcity. India's Punjab and Haryana states, which depend on the eastern rivers, have overexploited groundwater to the point that the water table is falling by one metre annually in some districts. Both countries are building more dams and barrages not out of aggression but desperation.

A Familiar Pattern

The Ganges presents a different but equally intractable problem. The 1996 treaty guaranteed Bangladesh a minimum flow of 35,000 cubic feet per second at the Farakka Barrage during the dry season (January to May). But the Ganges flow at Farakka has declined sharply. In 2024, flow dropped below 30,000 cfs for 47 days—the longest shortfall on record. India attributes this to reduced rainfall and upstream withdrawals by Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Bangladesh blames Indian diversions and has raised the issue repeatedly in bilateral talks. Neither side disputes the data. Both dispute the responsibility.

Bangladesh has proposed renegotiating the treaty to include monsoon-season storage and greater allocation during droughts. India has resisted, in part because any new formula would require difficult domestic negotiations with West Bengal, which controls Farakka. The result is a treaty that both sides nominally honour but neither believes is adequate. When the 30-year term expires in 2026, renewal is far from certain. Bangladeshi officials have begun exploring alternative sources, including deep groundwater and desalination, at considerable cost. India, for its part, has linked the Ganges to a broader discussion of water infrastructure cooperation—a proposal Bangladesh views as an attempt to dilute its treaty rights.

Nepal and the Unbuilt Dams

India's treaties with Nepal have a different pathology: they exist but are not implemented. The Mahakali Treaty of 1996 envisioned joint development of the Pancheshwar multipurpose dam, a 6,480-megawatt project that would provide power and irrigation to both countries. Thirty years later, not a single cubic metre of concrete has been poured. Negotiations over cost-sharing, benefit distribution, and resettlement have stalled repeatedly. Nepal's political instability—10 governments in 15 years—has made sustained negotiation nearly impossible. India's bureaucratic inertia has not helped. The project cost has ballooned from an estimated $3 billion to over $12 billion, and neither side has secured financing.

Meanwhile, the Kosi Agreement of 1954, which governs flood management, has become a source of grievance rather than cooperation. The Kosi Barrage, built by India in Nepal's territory, was intended to control flooding in Bihar. Instead, siltation and poor maintenance have worsened floods. In August 2008, the barrage breached, displacing 3.3 million people in Bihar and killing more than 500. Nepal accused India of neglecting maintenance. India accused Nepal of refusing to dredge upstream. The agreement remains in force, but trust does not.

Why This Is Happening

Three forces are undermining South Asia's water treaties. The first is climate change. Glacial melt, erratic monsoons, and prolonged droughts have made river flows unpredictable. Treaties written for stable hydrology cannot cope with variability. The second is population growth and economic development. India's population has doubled since 1960; Pakistan's has quadrupled. Demand for water has grown faster than supply. The third is political fragmentation. Water policy in India is controlled by states, not the central government, making it difficult to negotiate credibly. In Pakistan, provinces clash over allocations. In Nepal, coalition governments struggle to maintain policy continuity.

Institutional decay has compounded these pressures. The Permanent Indus Commission, which meets annually to implement the treaty, has become a forum for exchanging accusations rather than solving problems. The Joint Rivers Commission for the Ganges has not met since 2019. The World Bank, which brokered the Indus Treaty, has limited leverage; both India and Pakistan are now middle-income countries less reliant on Bank financing. Regional institutions like the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) have been moribund since 2016, when India and several other members boycotted the summit in Islamabad. There is no credible multilateral mechanism to manage transboundary water disputes in South Asia.

What Is Being Done

The response so far has been unilateral adaptation rather than cooperative renegotiation. India is investing $87 billion in interlinking rivers—a plan to divert surplus water from the Ganges and Brahmaputra basins to water-scarce regions in the west and south. The project, championed by the Modi government, has alarmed Bangladesh and Nepal, who fear it will reduce downstream flows. Pakistan is building the Diamer-Bhasha Dam, its largest infrastructure project, to store water and generate power. Bangladesh is turning to expensive alternatives like desalination and importing water from Bhutan. Nepal is exploring agreements with China for Himalayan water projects, a move that has unsettled Delhi.

Track II dialogues—unofficial talks among academics, former diplomats, and water experts—have produced useful proposals. A 2023 report by the Stimson Center and the Observer Research Foundation recommended creating a South Asia Water and Climate Resilience Fund, jointly managed by riparian states, to finance adaptation projects and compensate downstream communities for upstream infrastructure. The idea has received polite interest and no funding. Another proposal, floated by the Asian Development Bank, suggests modernising treaties to include climate triggers—automatic renegotiation clauses if flows fall below defined thresholds for consecutive years. Neither India nor Pakistan has endorsed this publicly.

What Should Be Done

Three steps are necessary, none of them easy. First, existing treaties must be updated to reflect hydrological reality. This does not mean abandoning them—the political cost would be prohibitive—but rather adding adaptive protocols. The Indus Treaty could include a joint commission with authority to approve or modify hydropower projects based on downstream impact assessments. The Ganges Treaty could incorporate a sliding scale of allocations tied to actual flow, rather than fixed volumes. Such changes would require political courage, particularly in India, where any appearance of concession to Pakistan is electorally toxic.

Second, regional institutions need reviving. SAARC is unlikely to recover, but smaller coalitions could work. India, Bangladesh, and Nepal could establish a Ganges Basin Organisation with binding arbitration provisions, modelled loosely on the Mekong River Commission. India and Pakistan could agree to empanel a standing Court of Arbitration for Indus disputes, avoiding the procedural deadlock that has paralysed current cases. This would require external guarantors—perhaps the World Bank again, or a coalition of donors including the Asian Development Bank and the European Union—to provide both financing and diplomatic pressure.

Third, water must be decoupled from the broader India-Pakistan relationship. The Indus Treaty survived wars because it was insulated from politics. That insulation has eroded. In 2019, after the Pulwama attack, Indian officials briefly threatened to "revoke" the treaty—a legally meaningless but politically potent gesture. Pakistan's response was to internationalise the dispute, taking it to the UN and the International Court of Justice. Neither move solved anything. What is needed is a return to the original pragmatism: water is too important to be held hostage to security disputes. Both countries need the rivers more than they need to score points against each other.

The Reckoning Ahead

The collapse of South Asia's water treaties would not be sudden or dramatic. It would be a slow unravelling: more droughts, more floods, more displacement, more conflict over allocations. Farmers in Pakistan's Punjab would see their tube wells run dry. Millions in Bangladesh's coastal districts would face saltwater intrusion. India's northern plains, already water-stressed, would tip into crisis. These are not hypothetical risks. They are observable trends.

The international community has largely ignored South Asia's water crisis, in part because the region's diplomacy is so dysfunctional that outsiders see little scope for productive engagement. That is a mistake. Water scarcity is a threat multiplier. It exacerbates poverty, fuels migration, and increases the risk of armed conflict. A 2022 study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that transboundary water disputes have been a contributing factor in 18 interstate conflicts since 2000. South Asia, with its nuclear-armed neighbours and fragile infrastructure, can ill afford to add water to the list of grievances.

The treaties are not dead yet. But they are on life support, and the prognosis is not encouraging. Updating them will require the kind of far-sighted statesmanship that is currently in short supply across the region. The alternative—letting them fail—will be far more costly. In 1960, the Indus Treaty was hailed as proof that even hostile neighbours could cooperate over something as vital as water. It would be a bitter irony if, 66 years later, it became proof of the opposite.