Recently, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Water Resources recommended that the government should renegotiate the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), signed in 1960, with Pakistan, in view of pressing challenges such as “climate change, global warming and environmental impact assessment”. Without making overtures of abrogating the treaty, which has often been part of the debate in midst of tensions with Pakistan, the committee, in no uncertain terms, acknowledged the rationality of the framing of IWT “on the basis of knowledge and technology existing at the time”.
Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe.
IWT, with its emphasis on hydraulic engineering, divided the basin into upper and lower parts (the western and eastern rivers), and envisaged the most complete utilisation of the waters through dams, barrages and canals. Without the treaty, Pakistan would have been constrained to build grand hydraulic works to transfer water from the western rivers to meet its irrigation needs and become independent of the eastern rivers. And without the eastern rivers being given exclusively to India, it would have struggled to operationalise the Bhakra and Nangal dams. The Rajasthan canal would not have made much progress, and the Ravi–Beas link canal would have failed to take off.
Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe.
However, during the IWT negotiations, there was no unified methodology or specialised institutions to foretell the dangers of the climate crisis on water resources. With the advancement of science and improvement in measurements, snow and glacier melt in the upper Indus hydrology, which contribute to 60-70% of total average flow in the Indus river system, and precipitation patterns are now better understood. The contribution of these sources to the Indus Basin is undergoing considerable variations explained by the weather systems and the monsoon.
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