The Indus Waters Treaty: South Asia’s most durable accord faces a tough test
The Indus Waters Treaty: South Asia’s Most Durable Accord Faces a Tough Test
WRITTEN BY FARWA AAMER
7 August 2025
In April 2025, after a deadly terrorist attack in Pahalgam that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan, India took an unprecedented step: it suspended cooperation under the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT). For over six decades, the IWT had stood as a rare pillar of India-Pakistan cooperation, surviving full-scale wars, border skirmishes, and prolonged diplomatic freeze. Its suspension, followed by a short but intense military confrontation between these nuclear-armed neighbours in May, signals a tectonic shift in how water and geopolitics may collide in South Asia’s fragile equilibrium.
However, a crisis could create an inflection point to revisit the treaty and build a more resilient water-sharing mechanism to avoid any scenarios where weaponisation of shared water resources becomes the norm.
A pact in an era of precarious waters
Signed in 1960 under the auspices of the World Bank, the IWT allocated the waters of the Indus Basin’s six rivers between India and Pakistan. The eastern rivers of Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej were granted to India, while Pakistan retained rights over the western rivers of Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab. India received limited rights over the Western rivers for non-consumptive uses, such as hydropower generation, but under tightly regulated conditions to ensure downstream flows.
What had made the treaty exceptional so far was its political resilience and its mechanisms, chief among them the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC), with a commissioner from each side, and a multi-tiered dispute resolution process. While the treaty does offer a path from bilateral talks to technical review and, if needed, international arbitration, both sides have interpreted its provisions differently. Past disagreements have centred on Indian hydropower projects such as Kishenganga and Ratle, with both countries at odds over whether the technical design of these projects violates the IWT provisions. In 2023, India sought a modification of the treaty, which was followed by another formal notice to Pakistan in 2024. India has long argued that the treaty disproportionately favours Pakistan and no longer reflects contemporary needs.
The Indus River has long bound India and Pakistan together, even when politics pulled them apart. Its future now hangs in the balance.
The current stalemate is compounded by India’s categorical rejection of the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s recent supplemental award, which reaffirmed that the treaty cannot be unilaterally suspended. Pakistan welcomed this ruling while India continues to question the legitimacy of arbitral processes it hasn’t explicitly consented to, calling into question the efficacy of the treaty’s own enforcement mechanisms. For India, it remains firm that the treaty will remain in abeyance until Pakistan addresses the issues of cross-border terrorism.
The limits of water as leverage
Despite inflammatory rhetoric from Indian political leadership, including Home Minister Amit Shah’s vow that “Pakistan will be starved of water”, the physical infrastructure required for large-scale diversion, storage, or stoppage does not yet exist. Any significant alteration of flow would require new dams, tunnels, or diversions which all take years, even decades, to build and come with massive political, economic, and environmental costs. Reports of expanding the Ranbir Canal and revival of the Sawalkote hydropower project, intended to increase water usage from the Chenab, may signal clear intent and have symbolic weight for now, but would also take considerable time and planning to implement.
For now, Pakistan’s water flows remain largely intact, but the threat of long-term disruption looms. For a country where agriculture employs nearly 40 per cent of the population and relies heavily on sustained flows of the Indus Basin waters, that threat is existential. Already facing acute water stress and barely recovering from the economic damage of the 2022 floods, a pause in hydrological data sharing and even minor disruptions in timing or volume could have serious consequences for Pakistan’s food and energy security, water supply, and economic stability, making it a risk that the country cannot ignore.
What complicates the calculus further is that this is not a one-sided vulnerability. China is an upstream power on key South Asian rivers, including the Indus, and more consequentially, on the Yarlung Tsangpo River — also known as the Brahmaputra in India — shared between China, India, and Bangladesh. China has been rapidly expanding its hydro-infrastructure on the river, much to the unease of downstream India. The announcement in 2020 of a massive dam project, now under construction, intensified these apprehensions. Although China frames these initiatives as purely aimed at hydropower generation, they have been broadly interpreted in India as serving strategic and territorial objectives, amid strained bilateral ties.
Unlike with Islamabad, there is no formal water-sharing agreement between New Delhi and Beijing on the Brahmaputra. India’s decision to leverage its upstream position risks setting a precedent that China could follow with India when the latter’s own water needs are rapidly rising.
In an already fragile region lacking robust multilateral frameworks to govern transboundary waters, and where trust-building among neighbours has grown increasingly inadequate, the breakdown of the IWT could normalise the weaponisation of water with potentially severe consequences.
A case for rethinking the treaty, not abandoning it
The IWT, for all its durability, is a relic of a different time. It was conceived in an era when partition lines were freshly drawn, and the treaty’s primary focus was dividing water and maintaining peace. Today, it faces multifaceted challenges, far beyond what its architects could have anticipated.
South Asia remains one of the least integrated regions when it comes to transboundary water governance. It lacks basin-wide platforms like the Mekong River Commission, and neither India nor Pakistan, and not even China, are party to the 1992 UNECE Water Convention or the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention owing to differences in opinions over its provisions on what all may constitute as legal violations, though Bangladesh became the first South Asian country in June to accede to the Water Convention. The absence of regional or global frameworks to supplement bilateral treaties like the IWT has left a vacuum; one increasingly filled by mistrust, misinformation, and securitised posturing.
The current suspension of treaty-level engagement reflects a hardening of political positions on both sides. In the immediate aftermath of the May 2025 ceasefire, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had reiterated that “terror and talks cannot go together; water and blood cannot flow together”. Pakistan’s former foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari had also stated that India has the option to either share water fairly or “we will deliver water to us from all six rivers”. These postures, while popular domestically, carry dangerous implications as they set deeply politicised narratives over a vital human resource like water.
Yet beyond the rhetoric, both countries face similar hydrological stress. India and Pakistan are among the world’s most water-stressed nations, with declining per capita availability, aging infrastructure, and inefficient agricultural practices. According to UNDP, Pakistan is expected to have less than 500 cubic meters of water availability per person by 2025, and the recent WEF Global Risks Report identified India as one of the countries with water shortage as an immediate risk. These challenges are compounded by shared vulnerabilities to climate change, including altered monsoon patterns, glacial melt, and extreme weather events.
Given these shared risks, the logic of cooperation remains compelling. What is urgently needed is not the abandonment of the IWT, but a thoughtful reinvigoration. Modernising the treaty must go beyond surface-level reforms and instead build a future-ready architecture for transboundary cooperation, insulate it from being repeatedly drawn into political crises, and allow it to function as a buffer against them.
A reinvigorated IWT and issue-based cooperation
A reinvigorated IWT could address historical grievances on any provisions, build a more strengthened and empowered PIC to act proactively, embed climate resilience, as well as simplify and clarify arbitration processes to avoid any ambiguities that stall dispute resolution. Political will is, of course, the hardest currency to generate in the current climate. But even in the absence of full-spectrum dialogue, some steps can keep the window of cooperation ajar. Just as backchannel diplomacy by key international players and Director General of Military Operations level talks halted the military conflict, there is room for quiet diplomacy that could support issue-based cooperation on shared water challenges. Track II dialogues among experts, former officials, and civil society can also help maintain channels of trust even when official communication is frozen.
At the domestic level, both countries should prioritise reforms that make their water sectors more efficient and less vulnerable to scarcity. Promoting less water-intensive agriculture, investing in wastewater recycling, and building better rainwater storage facilities would lower overall pressure on shared resources. Such moves would not only improve national water security but also reduce the stakes of bilateral disputes.
It is also in both countries’ diplomatic interest to avoid escalation. India’s position as a global leader on climate adaptation and sustainable development, especially as the voice of the global south, could be undermined by any perception of using water coercively. Pakistan, for its part, is eager to reset its relations with the United States and international lenders and would gain little from appearing obstructionist on water issues. Both sides have more to lose from confrontation than they stand to gain.
The Indus River has long bound India and Pakistan together, even when politics pulled them apart. Its future now hangs in the balance. What is needed now is not brinkmanship, but statesmanship. Whether the two neighbours can summon it remains to be seen. But if there were ever a moment for reimagining cooperation over conflict, it is now.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Farwa Aamer is the Director of South Asia Initiatives at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) in New York where she heads the institute’s policy work and projects in South Asia. Image credit: Pixabay/Graphixmade.