Risk of first war of the mankind on water. (a nuclear war)
The real issue is timing. If India chooses to fill its dams at a crucial time for Pakistan, it has the potential to ruin a crop. Mr. Briscoe estimates that if India builds all its planned projects, it could have the capacity of holding up about a month’s worth of river flow during Pakistan’s critical dry season, enough to wreck an entire planting season. And can cause flood in Pakistan by releasing its water.
Pakistan is about to slip into a category of country the United Nations defines as “water scarce.” “They are confronting a very serious water issue,” said a senior American official in Islamabad. “There’s a high amount of anxiety, and it’s not misplaced.” The design of the dam requires that much of the water in the Kishenganga River be diverted for much of the year. That will kill off fish and harm the livelihoods of the people living in the Pakistan-administered side of Kashmir, Pakistani officials say. In a country where summer temperatures reach 120 degrees, as much as 40 percent of Pakistan’s water is lost before even reaching the roots of the plants, experts say.
India's Wular Lake, a popular picnic and tourist spot nestled in the Kashmir Valley, is an unlikely site for conflict. But India's plan to build a structure on the Jhelum River at the mouth of the lake that will allow it to release water during the river's lean winter months has outraged neighboring Pakistan, which believes the project will give India the power to control how much water flows downstream to its farmers.
The countries' early leaders anticipated this fierce rivalry over the waters that straddle their volatile border. Following protracted and painstaking negotiations, they signed an accord in 1960 called the Indus Waters Treaty that determined exactly how the region's rivers are to be divided.
In the treaty, control over the three "eastern" rivers — the Beas, Ravi and Sutlej — was given to India and the three "western" rivers — the Indus, Chenab and Jhelum — to Pakistan. More controversial, however, were the provisions on how the waters were to be shared. The treaty has been widely hailed as a success, having survived three post-independence wars between the hostile nuclear neighbors. But its resilience is increasingly being tested by challenges thrown up by the 21st century. For one, Pakistan is on the brink of water scarcity. Its once-lush agricultural fields, which employ half of all Pakistanis and account for a quarter of its GDP, are now frequently parched. In Pakistan, which is deeply distrustful of its larger and more powerful neighbor, the country's crippling water shortage is seen as a direct result of India's upstream dams and water projects.
India has ramped up its hydroelectricity projects in recent years to try to boost its woefully inadequate power supplies. The government has a total of 45 projects either already completed or in the proposal stage on the western rivers, some as large as 1000 megawatt and many as small as 2 and 3 megawatt. This expansion has irked Islamabad. "India is putting more and more restrictions and constrictions on Pakistan's waters," Kamal Majidulla, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani's special assistant on water resources and agriculture, tells TIME.
The countries have already been embroiled in two high-profile legal fights over water. In 2005, Pakistan challenged India's 450-megawatt Baglihar dam before a World Bank-appointed neutral expert and lost. And last year, the countries went head to head at the International Court of Arbitration over India's 330-megawatt Kishanganga project in Jammu and Kashmir. The court has ordered India to temporarily stop some constructions on the dam while assessments are being made. Pakistan is also considering arbitration to iron out differences over another dam — the Nimoo Bazgo — on the Indus.
Few believe India and Pakistan will actually go to war over the disputes, but one thing is for certain: water is making it harder for the long-time rivals to put their enmity behind them. India's new dams threaten Pakistan's farming sector
Through its dams India could manipulate the timing of the flow of water, the original treaty restricted the amount of "live storage" - the water stored in a reservoir that can affect the river's flow.
Crucially, spillway gates were prohibited on all of India's projects on the western rivers, which could control the timing of the flow of water. Then in the 1990s, India proposed the Baglihar Hydroelectric Power Project in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. The Baglihar dam straddled the Chenab River and Pakistan objected on the grounds that, among other things, the project violated the 1960 treaty because it included spillway gates. India's very reasonable counter-argument was that the dam would silt up without these gates.
The World Bank, which had been a party to the original treaty, appointed a Swiss civil engineer to arbitrate the technical aspects. In 2007, the engineer released his findings. While modifying some of the project's design, he found technically that India's argument was sound and ruled in its favour as far as the spillway gates were concerned. As a result, Pakistan lost its single assurance that India would not manipulate the flow of water. And, now that it had the capability, India used it. To quote a recent article by John Briscoe, a former senior adviser to the World Bank who has worked on water issues on the subcontinent for 35 years: "This vulnerability was driven home when India chose to fill Baglihar exactly at the time when it would impose maximum harm on farmers in downstream Pakistan."
As the article War or peace on the Indus pointed out, by manipulating the flow of water earlier this year, India adversely affected Pakistan's summer crop. What is more, this is not the only dam under construction in Indian Kashmir or the rest of India on the western rivers of Jehlum and Chenab. Kishanganga, Sawalkot, Pakuldul, Bursar, Dal Huste, Gyspa - the list of dam projects goes on and on.
"The cumulative live storage will be large, giving India an unquestioned capacity to have major impact on the timing of flows into Pakistan," Mr Briscoe writes. "If, God forbid, India so chose, it could use this cumulative live storage to impose major reductions on water availability in Pakistan during the critical planting season."
Given an ideal situation, I agree with Mr Briscoe that the treaty between the two countries is still workable. But now Pakistan is entirely dependent on Indian good will. Already the water shortage in the Chenab during the planting season this year forced Pakistani Punjab to seek to re-route the Indus River water to ensure full agricultural production. The province of Sindh disagreed and, since in the domestic division of water between the provinces of Pakistan Sindh has primacy over the waters of Indus, Punjab had to give in.
There is a strong case for Pakistan to urgently re-negotiate the entire Indus Water Treaty. At the minimum, the agreement should include international monitoring systems as safeguards against misuse of the dam modifications that are now permitted to India.
In an ideal world, we would hope India would not deliberately cause Pakistan's agriculture any unnecessary harm. No one, however, could argue that India and Pakistan's relations are ideal in any way. Brig Shaukat Qadir is a retired Pakistani infantry officer.
Pakistani President Mohammad Ayub Khan and Indian Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru sign the Indus Water Treaty, September 16, 1960
The Treaty worked more or less satisfactorily over the years, even during the 1965 and 1971 wars. However, since its rise as an economic power, India has started to flex its muscle and begun abusing the Treaty by planning huge dam-like structures on the Western Rivers. It has already built one on the Chenab River called the Baglihar dam and is currently building another one on the Jhelum River called the Kishanganga dam.
LOCATION OF PROJECTS ON RIVER INDUS
Pakistan’s concern about the issue is evident from the fact that according to the Strategic Foresight Group, an Indian think tank, every proposal that Pakistan has made since 1999 in the two-track diplomacy has focused on water as a matter of pivotal concern to that country.
The gravity of the situation can be gauged from the fact that in March 2009, a group of more than 20 different UN bodies warned that given the rising tension over the water issue between Pakistan and India, the world could be perilously close to its first water war.
LOCATION OF COMMISSIONED PROJECTS ON RIVER JHELUM
The question arises: why is India bent upon building these dams? Is it doing so merely to generate electricity or is there some hidden agenda behind it as well? From all the available evidence, it is clear that
India is trying to acquire capability to control the waters of the Western Rivers in order to release them to inundate Pakistani territory or withhold them to render it dry at an opportune moment. Independent and neutral observers tend to agree with Pakistan’s assessment. For example, this is what John Brisco, Professor of Environmental Engineering at the Harvard University, who has worked on the issue for quite some time, has to say in the matter:
LOCATION OF PROJECTS ON RIVER INDUS
“[There] is a veritable caravan of Indian projects-Kishanganga, Sawalkot, Pakuldul, Bursar, Dal Huste, Gypsa. The cumulative live storage would be large, giving India an unquestioned capacity to have major impact on the timing of flows into Pakistan…
[Calculations suggest] that once it has constructed all of the hydropower plants on the Chenab, India will have ability to effect major damage on Pakistan.”
Incidentally, if India is trying to control the flow of the Western Rivers, its attitude has been no different towards its other South Asian neighbours. It has succeeded in imposing unfair water treaties like the Mahakali and Tanakpur Agreements on Nepal and the Ganges Agreement of 1996 on Bangladesh. Additionally, it has plans to interlink Brahmaputra, Ganges and Meghna rivers by transferring water from surplus to deficient rivers which would hit Bangladesh hard as it would deprive the latter of water which it has historically used. In this backdrop, the Indian intentions vis-a-vis Pakistan through vast dam-building plans become clear. It is not only to steal waters which rightfully belong to Pakistan but also to use them as a weapon to reduce Pakistan to the status of Nepal or Bangladesh. India is doing so because it is a hegemonistic power which is bent upon imposing its version of the Monroe doctrine on South Asia. It is making a strategic use of water to subdue Pakistan which is the last line of resistance against India’s quest for supremacy in South Asia.
India's dam plans anger Pakistan, symbolise global water woes
ITS three great basins - the Indus, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra - are the most densely populated area in the world. The Ganges alone supports half a billion people.
Seventy per cent of South Asia's 1.5 billion people live in farming families, and depend on the water of those basins for their survival. That number grows by 25 million every year.
For generations the rivers have watered the bread basket of the Punjab, the cotton plants and fruit trees of the Sindh, and the rice paddies of Bangladesh, and grown this region faster than anywhere else.
The issue of water in this part of the world is back in the spotlight with a case before the Permanent Court of Arbitration this week between Pakistan and India.
Pakistan claims a new hydroelectric plant India is building on the Kishanganga River
A security report from the US Director of National Intelligence released this year says that over the next decade ''many countries … will experience water problems - shortages, poor water quality, or floods - that will risk instability and state failure''.
''As a result of demographic and economic development pressures, North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia will face major challenges coping with water problems.''
Last year, Pakistani newspaper Nawa-i-Waqt urged the government: ''Pakistan should convey to India that a war is possible on the issue of water and this time war will be a nuclear one.''
Most experts argue a declared war between nations in the near future is likely to happen. Which may wipeout both countries from world.
The Strategic Foresight Group has postulated the idea of an ''arc of hydro insecurity'', stretching from Vietnam through China, South Asia, to Iran, Iraq and other Middle East countries, through to Egypt and Kenya in East Africa.
Scarce water will drive up food prices, destabilise governments and spark mass migrations.
A Dutch study found that by the middle of this century, shrinking glaciers will reduce the flow of water to the Indus by 8 per cent.
Environmental author B. G. Verghese told The Age : ''Water, and the energy that comes from water, affects every household. If you have a 12-hour blackout, children cannot do their homework, factories cannot operate. If the well is empty and the women have to walk to the next village for water, mini water-wars break out between villages, fighting over the last bucket.
''More people will be killed by insanitary water than by all the sum total of all the wars and all the insurgencies that might be fought.''
CSS Exam 2013: pak india water dispute
pakistan me har taraf aag lagi hai, so they need flood everywhere to cool things down there. India should help pakistan by releasing water of all rivers in pakistan
Wow india is such a helpful country, during the summers you guys accumulate whole water to cause scarcity of water in Pakistan and then when monsoon come then you guys throw all water to Pakistan.
Thank you india!! For being such a nice neighbor.