India blocks three rivers flowing from its territory into Pakistan: report

[Dotachin]

Why are you so concerned Mr.????

You misunderstood monsieur. In thread like these between India and Pakistan, I am the guy with popcorn.

 

[RescueRanger]

Yazeed ke nasal!

 

[American Pakistani]

I think the better solution would be 50:50 split in all the 5 rivers.

Because if we stop the 3 rivers, even though we have all the rights as per IWT, it may cause serious ecological problems on the downstream land due to the lack of water.

50:50 split will ensure that all parts of the river hinterland not getting affected much. India and Pakistan should work towards this.

According to IWT, India can use 3 eastern rivers and Pakistan got 3 western rivers. Now india wants 3 western rivers too.

China isn't diverting brahmaputra yet.
Who's gonna pay for diversion

China have all means of finance and engineering. If they say they wanna divert they know what they are saying.

 

[VCheng]

Yazeed ke nasal!

But Pakistan has never been able to show any violation of IWT by India in any international forum.

 

[Soumitra]

According to IWT, India can use 3 eastern rivers and Pakistan got 3 western rivers. Now india wants 3 western rivers too.

No we are taking all the water from the eastern rivers and building (perfectly legal) run of the river dams on the western rivers.

 

[kris]

China have all means of finance and engineering. If they say they wanna divert they know what they are saying.

It's not only about finances, it's about cost effectiveness, cost - benefit ratio
Any hydro-engineer will tell better

 

[RescueRanger]

But Pakistan has never been able to show any violation of IWT by India in any international forum.

Whatever helps you sleep at night chief!

 

[VCheng]

Whatever helps you sleep at night chief!

The facts Sir. Let us stick to the facts. Has Pakistan been able to prove a violation of IWT by India, ever?

 

[RescueRanger]

The facts Sir. Let us stick to the facts. Has Pakistan been able to prove a violation of IWT by India, ever?

How long is a piece of string? Chowdhury marey chittar aur ap mango facts! Bohat Khoob!

It is widely known and accept FACT that India uses the Harmon Doctrine to give validity to the water dispute with Pakistan. Economists and people much smarter than me have advocated the use of Coase theorem for arbitration between interstate and cross border resource negotiations.

The main lesson of Coase is that one should not presume that central intervention is desirable or necessary in inter-state water disputes. However, there are situations in which bilateral or multilateral bargaining among concerned state governments may not be efficient or equitable on its own.

The relevant provisions of the Indian Constitution are

• Entry 17 in the State List
• Entry 56 in the Union List and
• Article 262.

Article 262 explicitly grants parliament the right to legislate over the matters in Entry 56, and also gives it primacy over the Supreme Court. Parliament has not made much use of Entry 56.

Various River Authorities have been proposed, but not legislated or established as bodies vested with powers of management. Instead, river boards with only advisory powers have been created. Hence, the state governments dominate the allocation of river waters.

Since rivers cross state boundaries, disputes are inevitable. The Inter-State Water Disputes Act of 1956 was legislated to deal with conflicts, and included provisions for the establishment of tribunals to adjudicate where direct negotiations have failed. However, states have sometimes refused to accept the decisions of tribunals. Therefore, arbitration is not binding.

Hence, the state governments dominate the allocation of river waters. Since rivers cross state boundaries, disputes are inevitable. The Inter-State Water Disputes Act of 1956 was legislated to deal with conflicts, and included provisions for the establishment of tribunals to adjudicate where direct negotiations have failed. However, states have sometimes refused to accept the decisions of tribunals.

Therefore, arbitration is not binding. Significantly, the courts have also been ignored on occasion. Finally, the center has sometimes intervened directly as well, but in the most intractable cases, such as the sharing of the Ravi-Beas waters among Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, and Punjab, central intervention, too, has been unsuccessful.

there is a precedence of negotiation in water dispute cases in India, namely:
(1) The Krishna-Godavari water dispute
(2) The Cauvery water dispute
(3) The Ravi-Beas water dispute : PLEASE NOTE that an initial agreement on the sharing of the waters of the Ravi and Beas after partition was reached in 1955.

According to Alan Richards and Nirvarkar Singh:
Political objectives Models of lobbying implicitly include some political considerations for the center, beyond maximizing the joint welfare of the two parties to the dispute. It is possible to incorporate such objectives, as well as self-interested behavior, more explicitly. Rather than the rather passive role assigned to the center in the standard rent-seeking model, we can think of it having its own objective function, and bargaining with the two states: the states have political support to offer the center, in return for a favorable decision on the water issue.

State governments dominate the allocation of river waters. Since rivers cross state boundaries, disputes are inevitable. The Inter-State Water Disputes Act of 1956 was legislated to deal with conflicts, and included provisions for the establishment of tribunals to adjudicate where direct negotiations have failed. However, states have sometimes refused to accept the decisions of tribunals. Therefore, arbitration is not binding. Significantly, the courts have also been ignored on occasion.


International Law:

International law provides a wealth of precedents on water use rights and obligations for both upper and lower riparian. The customary international law for transboundary fresh water resources provide for equitable utilization, the Madrid Declaration of 1911 says that the regime of rivers and lakes, contiguous or successive, could not be altered by one state to the detriment of a co-riparian without the consent of the other. This law was also an off-shoot of the same customary law.

Similarly, the Article 2 of Declaration of Montevideo 1933 points that no state may, without the consent of the other riparian state, introduce into water courses of an international character, for industrial or agricultural exploitation of their waters, any alterations which may prove injurious to other interested states.

Article 4, Chapter 2 of Helsinki Rules 1966 on the Uses of the Waters of International Rivers’, adopted by the International Law Association, insists that, “Each basin State is entitled, within its territory, to a reasonable and equitable share in the beneficial uses of the waters of an international drainage basin”.

UN Convention on the Law of the Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses adopted by General Assembly on May 21, 1997, is the treaty governing shared freshwater resources and is universally applicable to all member states.

UN Convention contains 37 articles arranged in seven parts. Yet Article 5, contained in Part II, reflects the principle that is widely regarded as the cornerstone of the Convention, and indeed the law in the field for equitable and reasonable utilisation and participation. It requires that a State sharing an international watercourse with other States utilise the watercourse, in its territory, in a manner that is equitable and reasonable vis-à-vis the other States sharing it.

With the UN Convention having been ratified by 36 states – after 17 years of adoption by the UN General Assembly – it has entered into force on August 17, 2014. While the majority of the countries have opted to remain outside its scope for now, the convention, however, establishes an important international law governing cross border watercourses declaring water rights of all riparians as sacrosanct and non-violable.

The customary international law, declarations, Helsinki rules and UN convention on the subject establishes two important principles for all river basins: one, that the first right over the water of the rivers is that of the people living in the basin, and the second that the shared waters could neither be stopped nor diverted without the consent of the other riparian state.

Time for a Pakistani Perspective:

For the people of Pakistan, a nation dependent upon agriculture for its survival, the Indus rivers are their lifeline. As it is, Pakistan is ranked second, after China, in the Water Shortage Index, highlighting the vulnerability of the Pakistani population to frequent water shortages. (DAWN: https://www.dawn.com/news/1292901)

The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, which governs water sharing arrangements between India and Pakistan, outlines a framework for how either country can exploit water potential and how they can’t. While the Indus Waters Treaty is upheld, India cannot turn the taps off — in fact, it does not have the capacity at the moment to do so either — but it can definitely delay the release of water flows. And historically, India hasn’t been averse to using this tactic when relations with Pakistan turn sour.

See: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2015/sdn1511tn.pdf

Pakistan is deeply dependent on those three western rivers and particularly the Indus. In some areas of the country, including all of Sindh province, the Indus is the sole source of water for irrigation and human consumption. If Pakistan’s access to water from the Indus Basin were cut off or merely reduced, the implications for the country’s water security could be catastrophic. For this reason, using water as a weapon could inflict more damage on Pakistan than some forms of warfare.

To understand why, consider the extent of Pakistan’s water woes. According to recent figures from the International Monetary Fund, Pakistan is one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, with a per capita annual water availability of roughly 35,300 cubic feet — the scarcity threshold. This is all the more alarming given that Pakistan’s water intensity rate — a measure of cubic meters used per unit of GDP — is the world’s highest. (Pakistan’s largest economic sector, agriculture, consumes a whopping 90 pc of the country’s rapidly dwindling water resources.)

In other words, Pakistan’s economy is the most water-intensive in the world, and yet it has dangerously low levels of water to work with.

As if that’s not troubling enough, consider as well that Pakistan’s groundwater tables are plummeting precipitously.

NASA satellite data released in 2015:

The images revealed that the underwater aquifer in the Indus Basin is the second-most stressed in the world. Groundwater is what nations turn to when surface supplies are exhausted; it is the water source of last resort. And yet in Pakistan, it is increasingly imperiled.

There are other compelling reasons for India not to cancel the IWT, all of which go beyond the hardships the decision could bring to a country where at least 40 million people (of about 200 million) already lack access to safe drinking water.

International water expert Ashok Swain has argued that revoking the IWT “will bring global condemnation, and the moral high ground, which India enjoys vis-à-vis Pakistan in the post-Uri period will be lost.” Also, the World Bank would likely throw its support behind any international legal action taken by Pakistan against India.

Daily O: https://www.dailyo.in/politics/indus-waters-treaty-pakistan-world-bank-uri-attack/story/1/13068.html

Second, if India decided to maximize pressure on Pakistan by cutting off or reducing river flows to its downstream neighbor, this would bottle up large volumes of water in northern India, a dangerous move that according to water experts could cause significant flooding in major cities in Kashmir and in Punjab state (for geographical reasons, India would not have the option of diverting water elsewhere).

Given this risk, some analysts have proposed that New Delhi instead do something less drastic, and perfectly legal, to pressure Islamabad: build dams on the western rivers of the Indus Basin.

The IWT permits this, even though these water bodies are allocated to Pakistan, so long as storage is kept to a minimum to allow water to keep flowing downstream. In fact, according to Indian media reports, this is an action Modi’s government is now actively considering taking.

If India were to erect several large hydroelectric dams on the western rivers, then Pakistan’s agriculture could conceivably lose up to a month’s worth of river flows — which could ruin an entire planting season.

If India pulls the plug on the IWT to punish its Pakistan, then it could set a dangerous precedent and give some ideas to China. Beijing has never signed on to any transboundary water management accord, and New Delhi constantly worries about its upstream rival building dozens of dams that cut off river flows into India. The Chinese, perhaps using as a pretext recent Indian defensive upgrades in the state of Arunachal Pradesh — which borders China and is claimed by Beijing — could well decide to take a page out of India’s book and slow the flow of the mighty Brahmaputra River.

It’s a move that could have disastrous consequences for the impoverished yet agriculturally productive northeastern Indian state of Assam. The Brahmaputra flows southwest across large areas of Assam. Additionally, Beijing could retaliate by cutting off the flow of the Indus — which originates in Tibet — down to India, depriving New Delhi of the ability to limit the river’s flows to Pakistan.

India's exit from the IWT will also give credence to the propaganda of their long time enemy the LeT who label India as a "Water Thief" : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...rorist-group-threaten-Indian-water-jihad.html

Finally established international law prohibits India as an upper riparian to stop or divert waters of the rivers to the detriment of the people of Pakistan without the prior and explicit approval from Pakistan beforehand. Just to be clear there is a strong case for India to renegotiate the terms of the IWT with Pakistan under Harmon Doctrine and in line with the original David Lilienthal report: http://www.unz.org/Pub/Colliers-1951aug04-00022

However simply pulling out of the IWT will have disastrous consequences for the Ordinary Pakistan and will not produce the desired result India is hoping from Islamabad.

 

[VCheng]

How long is a piece of string? Chowdhury marey chittar aur ap mango facts! Bohat Khoob!

A long reply, but one that fails to answer the question I posed: Has Pakistan been able to prove a violation of IWT by India, ever?

 

[RescueRanger]

A long reply, but one that fails to answer the question I posed: Has Pakistan been able to prove a violation of IWT by India, ever?

I see you failed to read what i wrote. You have not changed, if something doesn't suit your narrative you are blatantly dismissive. Please believe what helps you sleep at night. No need to reply to me again!

 

[VCheng]

I see you failed to read what i wrote. You have not changed, if something doesn't suit your narrative you are blatantly dismissive. Please believe what helps you sleep at night. No need to reply to me again!

I read it. The answer is still not addressed by that long diatribe.

Pakistan needs to able to prove a violation of IWT if the international community is to pay heed to its water concerns.

 

[RescueRanger]

I read it. The answer is still not addressed by that long diatribe.

Pakistan needs to able to prove a violation of IWT if the international community is to pay heed to its water concerns.

Did you even read the opening Paragraph regarding Harmon Doctrine and how it relates to Article 4, Chapter 2. Clearly NOT!

Also I have added you to my Ignore list, cannot deal with people who are not willing to read a researched and structured reply and regurgitate the same parroted one liner!

 

[VCheng]

========================================

My point that Pakistan needs to able to prove a violation of IWT if the international community is to pay heed to its water concerns.

Did you even read the opening Paragraph regarding Harmon Doctrine and how it relates to Article 4, Chapter 2. Clearly NOT!

Sir, I read your answer, and my response does not deserve a negative rating. My question is still unanswered by your long reply. Pakistan needs to able to prove a violation of IWT if the international community is to pay heed to its water concerns.

Also, a detailed answer is pointless if it does not relate to the question posed. As long as India and Pakistan remain within IWT, any other doctrines do not apply. My being ignored does nothing to change the facts as I have stated them. No wonder Pakistan is finding it hard to find traction for its points of view internationally, no matter how strongly advocated.

 

[VCheng]

============================

And then, on the other hand, we have this situation:

https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/sind...ater-woes-at-international-conference.529640/