Water is an emotional issue for India and Pakistan'

[IND151]

20+ years ago musharraf wrote a book in which he wrote that Pakistan wants Kashmir due to rivers in Kashmir coz those rivers can offer massive amount of water.

i have also read somewhere that Pakistani Punjab needs water and electricity on massive scale.

 

[IND151]

That's the problem, the Pakistanis don't want that. To be fair to them, Indus is pretty much their lifeline. The interests of Pakistan & that of India Kashmir are diametrically opposite. If J&K is allowed to harness the water to their advantage (both hydroelectric & irrigation), they could be adding billions of dollars to their economy & therefore to the people. The Indus treaty is believed by most in Indian Kashmir to be unfair to them. The Pakistanis had no problems with the treaty as long as India was not building anything on the rivers but the moment that India started building, the Pakistanis have realise their extremely acute dependance on what effectively translates as Indian goodwill towards them. The dams being built are going to keep the fear of God in the Pakistani establishment. While being within the treaty, it still gives India a method of squeezing Pakistan should India choose to do so. The Pakistanis know that & so do the Indians.

credit goes to GOI. finally our govt has done something right.

 

[fd24]

There are certain challenges that needs to be tackled jointly by India and Pakistan such as dealing with climatic changes that would decrease the waters of Indus or waters to Kashmiris who are suffering because of the IWT

Jade you are absolutely correct. Wish we could find the leadership to establish this.

 

[SQ8]

20+ years ago musharraf wrote a book in which he wrote that Pakistan wants Kashmir due to rivers in Kashmir coz those rivers can offer massive amount of water.

i have also read somewhere that Pakistani Punjab needs water and electricity on massive scale.

Musharraf never wrote a book 20 years ago... he only dictated events in his life as he saw them to a scribe who wrote it for him.. much like Ayub Khan's "friends not masters"..

He may have written a dissertation on Kashmir as part of his staff course.. or something..

 

[jha]

future war b\w pakistan and india will be on water issue

then we will just release them at once...Samhalte rahna..

 

[Bang Galore]

Kashmir's Raging Rivers

Can India and Pakistan overcome decades of mistrust to save the Indus Waters Treaty?

The Indus

Sixty years ago today, David Lilienthal published an article in Collier's Weekly that would prove uncannily prescient. Lilienthal, former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, had just returned from a visit to India and Pakistan and described two fledgling nations on the verge of another war over Kashmir. He made an unlikely suggestion to defuse tensions: The rivals should agree to manage jointly the Indus River and its main tributaries, some of which flowed through the contested region. Water, he claimed, was a hidden driver of South Asia's most dangerous territorial dispute and might also be the key to resolving it.

While Lilienthal's vision was never fully realized, his article helped sow the seeds of the Indus Waters Treaty, now widely hailed as one of the most successful international water-sharing agreements.

A resolution of the Kashmir conflict seems as elusive today as it did in 1951. Since 1989, armed Kashmiri separatists, some with Pakistani support, have waged a low-grade, off-and-on insurgency against Indian security forces. (Protests last summer against India's heavy-handed rule in the Kashmir Valley roiled the city for several weeks, leading to the deaths of at least 110 Kashmiris, many of them teenage boys.) Still, without the IWT, Kashmir might have been the source of even wider conflict.

Lilienthal recognized a truth that remains little discussed but as relevant as ever: The struggle for Kashmir was motivated in large part by Pakistan's desperation to control the rivers that flowed through the region. "The starting point should be … to set to rest Pakistan's fears of deprivation and a return to desert," he wrote. The treaty would defuse these tensions at a critical point in the young nations' relations, by clearly spelling out how much water each was entitled to use from the rivers that crossed the western border.

India and Pakistan signed the IWT in 1960, after protracted negotiations facilitated by the World Bank. Before the partition of British India in 1947, each province had jurisdiction to build dams and other infrastructure for electricity and irrigation on the portions of the rivers that flowed through their land; after partition, a series of patchwork agreements left several key issues, such as whether and how much Pakistan should pay India for water and canal maintenance costs, unresolved. The IWT gave "unrestricted use" of the basin's thee western rivers (the Indus, the Jhelum, and the Chenab) to Pakistan and the three eastern rivers (the Ravi, the Beas, and the Sutlej) to India. Today, the treaty governs the use of roughly 55 trillion gallons of water per year, which sustains more than 210 million people in the basin.

The IWT has since solidly weathered three Indo-Pakistani wars (including two over Kashmir) and countless flare-ups between the now nuclear-armed neighbors. The Indian and Pakistani members of the treaty-stipulated Indus Waters Commission have met at least once every year, conducting amicable discussions and sharing important hydrological data even when their nations' diplomatic relations have been severed.
Advertisement

Yet the treaty shows signs of strain. In 2005, Pakistan invoked the arbitration provisions of the treaty—for the first time in its history—in response to India's construction of a large hydropower project on the Chenab River. Pakistan has since raised objections to several other power projects on IWT-governed rivers, spurred by its ancient fears that India's storage of water in those dams could threaten its agricultural production. While the treaty's existing provisions have largely been able to contain these disputes, two emerging trends—climate change and Kashmiris' desire for greater control over their water resources—threaten to undermine the very foundations of the treaty as a tool for averting conflict.

The Indus receives at least 30 percent of its flow from the region's shrinking glaciers—more than any other Asian river. As global warming plods on, experts expect increased flows and possibly flooding in the near term as the glacial "water towers" melt. But this spike will be followed by a long, painful tail of perennial scarcity as the glaciers' role in providing water during the dry season becomes greatly diminished.

The Indus basin's overwhelming dependence on snow and ice melt has led Shakil Romshoo, a professor of geophysics and geology at the University of Kashmir in Srinagar, to conclude that global warming will destabilize the IWT within the next few decades. In Kashmir, "the surface runoff … is decreasing," he says. "And on this surface water depends the entire economy of Pakistan."

About 80 percent of Pakistan's cultivated lands are irrigated by water from the Indus system, the lion's share being governed by the IWT. Of the IWT water, more than 70 percent of flows from the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The math gets worse for Pakistan: The country's population is projected to increase by 82 percent, from 184 million in 2010 to 335 million in 2050; per capita water availability was nearly 80 percent lower in 2005 than 1947, plunging from 5,600 cubic meters to 1,200 cubic meters, dangerously close to the 1,000-cubic-meter-per-person-per-year "water scarcity" threshold defined by the widely used Falkenmark index. A growing alarm in Pakistan over this hydrological straitjacket has in recent years spurred jihadi leaders based there to frame their attacks against India as a struggle to secure the rivers that form Pakistan's "lifeline."

The stakes are high for Kashmiris as well. A recent study in the journal Science concluded that the eventual reduced flow of meltwater from glaciers and snowfields threatens the food security of close to 30 million people living in the Indus basin. Many Kashmiri farmers have switched from grain production to less-thirsty horticulture in recent years due to the increasingly uncertain availability of water at critical times in the growing season.

Rising local resentment is the second factor jeopardizing the IWT. Kashmiri perspectives have never had a prominent voice in IWT-related discussions. Their frustration stems in part from the way the treaty limits the construction of new irrigation works and storage facilities for hydropower on the Indian side of the three western rivers (the ones granted to Pakistan for unrestricted use). But Kashmiris are also unhappy with the Indian government's decision to retain control over most of the existing hydro plants in their state, thus depriving the local government and economy of a critical source of revenue.

Any wider effort to industrialize Jammu and Kashmir's economy will depend on greater exploitation of the state's hydropower potential. The state potentially has up to 15,000 megawatts of exploitable hydropower, less than 10 percent of which has been tapped. But India hasn't allowed the state to access international financing to develop and operate more power plants on its rivers. It "is non-negotiable for us that … Kashmir will have to have control of its power resources," says Arjimand Hussain Talib, a Kashmiri newspaper columnist working on a book about Kashmir's water politics.

The state government recently hired an international consultant to do a thorough study of the economic losses incurred by Jammu and Kashmir due to restrictions on hydropower and agricultural development imposed by the treaty. Past speculative estimates have put the number around $1.5 billion per year. More detailed and credible numbers could give Kashmiris more leverage to wrest financial compensation from New Delhi.

Talib predicts that ongoing talks between India and Pakistan will ultimately result in "a kind of joint collaborative approach to the basin's management." This might take the form of a new successor agreement to the IWT, as some analysts call for. A more likely scenario than total renegotiation, according to Talib, would be India and Pakistan signing an "extension agreement." In this event, the countries would extend the IWT in a separate, complementary treaty to include joint planning and oversight in the early stages of infrastructure projects on the six rivers—even across Kashmir's militarized Line of Control.

This vision echoes a proposal Lilienthal floated sixty years ago. "The whole Indus system must be … designed, built and operated as a unit," Lilienthal argued, to benefit both India and Pakistan optimally. This objective, he insisted, "cannot be achieved by the countries working separately; the river pays no attention to partition."


Can the logic of enlightened self-interest—that is, a joint-management approach to the Indus waters—trump decades of mutual distrust?

Can India and Pakistan overcome decades of mistrust to save the crucial Indus Waters Treaty? - By Jonathan Mingle - Slate Magazine

 

[American Pakistani]

Correction

Survival issue.
You think there is true love for the Kashmiri's within the Pakistan establishment??
Its about water.. always has been.

Pakistani establishment doesn't care for Pakistan or Pakistanis, but a Pakistani do care for Kashmiri brothers.

 

[Dalai Lama]

Pakistani establishment doesn't care for Pakistan or Pakistanis, but a Pakistani do care for Kashmiri brothers.

Not trying to be smart but maybe you should care about yourselves first eh since the Pakistani establishment doesn't?

 

[Bang Galore]

Makings of a riparian rift

The race between India and Pakistan for control of water grows fiercer as population booms and glaciers recede

Stephen Myron Schwebel, an American jurist, recently became the first outsider in 64 years to cross the Line of Control (LoC) — the world's most militarised de-facto border that divides Indian and Pakistani Kashmir.

Schwebel's visit was neither the result of some kind of bonhomie between India and Pakistan, nor was it a culmination of any softening of stand on the Kashmir dispute. India remains averse to any third-party meddling in Kashmir, and Pakistan would be the last to wish American presence on its eastern borders as well.

In fact, during Schwebel's visit, Kashmir was the last word to be mentioned. Rather, it was water, the new-age conflict generator in South Asian politics.

Schwebel headed an International Court of Arbitration (COA) team that the United Nations has appointed to settle a "dispute" between India and Pakistan over the 330MW Kishanganga hydro-power project, being built by India in its part of Kashmir over the Kishanganga River.

Kishanganga is one among many projects that Pakistan is becoming wary of. Over the past few years Pakistan has been steadily upping the ante against almost all the major hydroelectric power projects in the state. Pakistan is a lower riparian state, which gets almost all its water from India, particularly from Indian Kashmir. To negate any major confrontation between the two countries, the World Bank helped them reach an agreement through the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) in 1960. The treaty has withstood two major wars between the nuclear-armed countries and numerous smaller conflicts. But now the situation is changing, as Pakistan's water needs have increased and availability has decreased alarmingly. Pakistan feels any new project will aggravate the situation.

Use of the water shared between the two countries is guided by IWT principles. A clause in the treaty gives priority rights to whichever country completes a hydroelectric project first on the Kishanganga River — and this has triggered fierce competition between the two neighbours.

India initiated the Kishanganga project, costing $820 million (Dh3,009 million), in the Gurez-Bandipora area of Kashmir, which would divert part of the river's flow, generate energy and discharge it in the Wular Lake. It involves construction of a 37-metre high concrete-faced rockfill dam and an underground powerhouse connected via a 16-kilometre water-diversion tunnel.

Feeling the heat, Pakistan too started a project just 70 kilometres downstream in its part of Kashmir. The Neelum-Jhelum hydroelectric project, as it is called, will generate 965MW of energy and will cost $2.25 billion.

But both India and Pakistan are ready to risk this gamble despite the huge amounts of money involved.

Even as competitive construction goes on, Pakistan has pointed a finger at the Indian project, calling it illegal in the light of the IWT. Having failed to resolve the issue bilaterally, Pakistan took the case to the International Court in 2010. Subsequently the UN appointed Judge Stephen Schwebel as chairman of the Court of Arbitration (COA). After a couple of hearings, the COA decided to visit the sites on the two sides of the divide and examine the "dispute" to decide on the issue.

According to Pakistan, the diversion of the Kishanganga River by India will reduce 27 per cent of the power-generation capacity of its Neelum-Jhelum project. There is also fear of reduced river flows for at least six months every year, irreparable loss to the environment, especially to the Musk Deer Gurez Park, and a dent in the tourism potential of the Neelum valley. Pakistani authorities say about 200 kilometres of riverbed will be affected by the project and about 40 kilometres of the length of the river will completely dry up; the water reduction will also severely affect agriculture in Pakistani Kashmir.

India rejects most of these accusations. The visit to the Kishanganga project site by the COA was part of efforts to resolve the dispute amicably. Besides holding a detailed review meeting about the project, the team also inspected the power house, the head race tunnel, the storage facility, the ventilation tunnel and the pressure shaft of the project. The media was barred from covering the event. "The team had a packed four-day visit," said Manzoor Ahmad Lone, the deputy commissioner, Bandipora district. "Since their visit was exclusively inspective in nature, they did not interact with anyone here."

Meanwhile, in their efforts to outrace each other in project construction, both have speeded up work. Pakistan's efforts have been supplemented by Chinese help — their project is constructed by a Chinese consortium. On the Indian side, engineering firms from the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany are working overtime to complete the project.

Pakistan was to complete its project in 2016 but massive delays will make it operational only by 2018.

Experts feel tunnel boring machines (TBT) can be a game changer for Pakistan in its race. TBT, if utilised at the Neelum-Jhelum project, will cut construction time by almost two years. But the proposal is held up in a big bureaucratic mess.

The media in Pakistan is agog with news that the country has almost lost its case to Kishanganga, as the Indian project is far ahead of theirs.

Kishanganga is not the only project that India and Pakistan have been fighting over. The two countries had faced off over the Baghlihar hydel-power project, built by damming the Pakistan-bound Chenab River in Indian Kashmir. In 2008 Pakistan was faced with decreased flow of water in the Chenab when India started to fill the dam. The river feeds water to 21 major canals and irrigates about 2.8 million hectares of arable land in Pakistan.

Pakistan Economy Watch (PEW), an economic think-tank, calculated that filling the Baghlihar dam would inflict a loss of $1.5 billion on Pakistan. Analysts in the country termed it a hydro weapon. The fast-flowing Chenab, a vital river for Pakistan's agriculture, has a high potential for generating power and India plans to generate 16,000MW of energy by constructing nine power houses on it.

Both the countries have had a history of water conflict from their days of independence. Professor Shaista Tabassum of Karachi University says in a paper that India stopped its canal waters from flowing into Pakistan on April 1, 1948, leaving about 5.5 per cent of west Pakistan's planted area and nearly 8 per cent of its cultivated area without irrigation at the start of the crucial summer season. The blockage brought the countries on the brink of war.

That memory is etched deep in the Pakistani mind, which now views every new project as additional leverage in the hands of India.

In the 1980s India planned a barrage over the Wular Lake in Kashmir but the project was stopped after objection from Pakistan. The project would have made most of the Jhelum River in Kashmir fit for navigation year round. But Pakistan feared its water-holding capacity and Kashmir was deprived of its water-transportation service.

The IWT has been under strain after being accused of a discriminatory attitude by all the three stakeholders — India, Pakistan and the state of Kashmir.

The water situation in Pakistan has been extremely worrisome. Coupled with mismanagement, experts fear it has become a ticking time bomb. According to latest estimates, Pakistan will face a water deficit of 25 million acre feet (MAF) in the next 15 years. The Indus River System Authority (IRSA) chairman in Pakistan, Rao Irshad Ali Khan, termed the situation gloomy. Khan said Pakistan will face a deficit of 20 MAF to 25 MAF between 2020 and 2025. Khan also said Pakistan is a water-deficient country with per capita water availability dropping to 1,000 cubic metres from 5,600 cubic metres in 1951.

"In the next 15 years the figure can go as low as 500 cubic metres per capita," Khan said. The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have already termed Pakistan one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, a situation which will degrade to outright water scarcity.

Pakistan's water situation is being blamed on wastage, a growing population, climate change and lack of water reservoirs. Some also point a finger at India's alleged manipulation of Pakistan-bound rivers.

Pakistan's population is expected to reach 333 million in 2025 from the present estimated population of 180 million, which will need more food and more water.

The seriousness of the situation can be gauged from the fact that Pakistan's intelligence agency, ISI, too, plunged into the scene as it feared water was becoming too hot to handle for national security.

Citing civilian government failure in raising objections over alleged Indian power projects in Kashmir in April this year, ISI seized the records of two federal ministries — of water and power, and environment — to investigate an alleged institutional lapse in raising objections over Indian aggression on the country's water rights and securing international carbon credits on hydel projects disputed by Pakistan.

ISI believes that the water issue is of vital national importance to Pakistan and recommended strong action against the officials found involved in negligence. Pakistan's long-time IWT commissioner Jamaat Ali Shah, too, was axed after allegations of lapses.

Kashmir, with its bountiful rivers and streams, has an estimated 20,000MW hydro-electric potential. But due to its meagre policies, and some hard policies by New Delhi, the state has not been able to harness the potential. In the past, the local state government tried to take the mega hydro-electric projects on its own with foreign funding, but the lack of counter-guarantees from New Delhi forced them to shelve the plans and hand over the projects to the National Hydro Electric Power Corporation (NHPC), which is often dubbed the East India Company for the imperial manner in which it exploits resources in Kashmir.

As of now, NHPC has four power projects operational in the state — Salal, Uri, Dul Hasti and Sewa-II. NHPC started its operations in India from Jammu and Kashmir when it commissioned the Salal project in 1975.

These four projects contribute 47 per cent to NHPC's cumulative generations. NHPC plans to add 329MW more to its capacity by commissioning three projects — Chutak (44MW), Uri-II (240 MW) and Nimo-Bazgo (45MW) — by March 2012.

Kashmir on its own has only managed to construct projects generating 750MW, far short of the demand for about 2,500MW.

NHPC's bad PR gets a fillip with the recent disclosure in the state assembly that the alarm-less silt flushing mechanism in NHPC dams has caused the loss of 25 lives. The state government is trying to force changes in its dams.

Forced by acute criticism, the state government decided to undertake new power projects in collaboration with the NHPC with an almost 50 per cent stake in it. The state-run power development corporation signed an agreement for a joint venture with the NHPC and Power Trading Corporation of India on 49:49:2 basis. The idea is to implement three Chenab basin projects with a cumulative installed capacity of 2,120MW (600MW Kiru, 1,000MW Pakal Dul and 520MW Kawar) on BOOM (build, own, operate and maintain) basis.

Kashmir sees IWT as a major obstacle in its development. Kashmiris feel that in the run-up to resolving their disputes, India and Pakistan have made them sacrificial goats. According to some estimates, Kashmir loses $1.3 billion annually on account of the prohibitions imposed by the IWT, because of which Kashmir cannot store water for generating electricity or for irrigation purposes. Due to IWT clauses, all hydro-electric projects in Indian Kashmir can only be "run of the river" type, which is costly and less efficient. An estimated 1.37 million hectares of land is devoid of irrigation facilities in Indian Kashmir due to restrictions imposed by the treaty.

Such is the intensity of the water conflict that former Pakistan prime minister Chaudhary Shujaat Hussain once warned that the water row will lead to all-out war between the two countries. He called for the immediate amendments of the IWT to make it relevant.

Some jihadi elements are labelling water as one of the reasons for waging war against India. Jamaat-u-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed (accused of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks) recently termed water as one of the important reasons for waging a militant struggle in Kashmir. With Kashmir already being a disputed zone, the addition of a water conflict makes it a lethal cocktail of instability.

One of the biggest culprits of the water shortages is climate change, which has shrunk most of the glaciers in Indian Kashmir. The change could not have arrived at a worse time, when water needs have increased manifold.

Shakil Romshoo, head of the Geology and Geophysics department at the University of Kashmir, has been part of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)-sponsored study on glaciers in Kashmir. He paints a gloomy picture. "Out of the 24 watersheds in the Jhelum basin, 17 are showing decline in discharge," Romshoo said.

Kashmir valley's biggest glacier, Kolahoi, is the worst hit. It is the lifeline of the valley and the source of the Jhelum. The 11-square-kilometre glacier is shrinking at 0.08 square kilometres a year. Till date, it has lost 2.63 square kilometres of its area.

Some of the smaller glaciers have altogether disappeared and some are on the verge of extinction. According to an Action Aid report on climate change in Kashmir, there has been an overall 21 per cent reduction in the glacier surface area in the Chenab basin, threatening another major river.

Experts fear even drinking water may one day be hard to come by. "Imagine a time when even drinking water supply is affected," Romshoo told a news agency. "Will the people of Kashmir allow waters to go to Pakistan?" It is this assertion of Kashmiris that is set to make the situation rocky over water in South Asia.

Haroon Mirani is a writer based in Srinagar, India.

gulfnews : Makings of a riparian rift

 

[Tshering22]

The water on our side of the border is ours. We use it to drink, to bathe, to dance in or to pray, it is none of others' business. We are not taking their water from their side of the border, so they should look into their corrupt water management before blaming India always.

And BTW, there is no water "issue" just like there is no "Kashmir issue". These two are the figments of imagination for our AMAN KI ASHA crowd idiots and of course, our friends across the border.

 

[IND151]

'India didn't block water even during war'
TNN Apr 6, 2010, 03.57am IST
Tags:
Pakistan|India
NEW DELHI: As Pakistan drums up officially-sponsored hysteria on the "water dispute" with India, the government believes Islamabad is giving political overtones to "technical" issues.

On Saturday, Sharat Sabharwal, Indian envoy to Pakistan, described Islamabad's attempts to paint a picture of India as a water thief as "preposterous and completely unwarranted".

Even though Pakistan submitted a "non-paper" to India during the foreign secretary talks in February, Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi was quoted as telling TV interviewers on Friday that it wasn't India stealing Pakistan's water but Pakistan was wasting its water.


"The total average canal supplies of Pakistan are 104 million acres/ft. And the water available at the farm gate is about 70 million acre/ft. Where does the 34 million acre/ft go? It's not being stolen in India. It's being wasted in Pakistan," Qureshi is reported to have said in an interview.

In fact, in an interview on March 16, Pakistan PM Yousuf Raza Gilani contradicted his own government's contention that India's "water theft" was adversely affecting its crops. "When I took over as prime minister, there was shortage of wheat, Now there is a surplus. There is so much surplus that we had to construct new storage for our strategic reserves," he said.

Sabharwal quoted Pakistan's own documents to say that it lets 38 million acre feet (MAF) of water flow into the sea, and that too, during the kharif crop season. Pakistan has, in its internal strategies, bemoaned the lack of its own storage capabilities and the lack of hydropower generation capabilities.

According to World Bank, Pakistan has only 150 cubic metres water storage capacity as against 5,000 cubic metres in US and Australia and 2,200 cubic metres in China. With the appalling lack of storage capacities in Pakistan, World Bank estimated that its water shortfall would increase by about 12% in the next decade. Sabharwal noted that this had nothing to do with India but was a more fundamental question of mismanagement of scarce resources by Pakistan.

"Water productivity in Pakistan remains low... crop yields are much lower than international benchmarks. India has nothing to do with these issues of water management that are internal to Pakistan. Only Pakistan can seek solutions to these matters," Sabharwal said.

"We have never hindered water flows to which Pakistan is entitled, not even during the wars of 1965 and 1971... those who allege that India is acquiring the capacity to withhold Pakistan's share of water completely ignore the fact that this would require storage and canal network on a large scale. Such a network simply does not exist," he added.

'India didn't block water even during war' - Times Of India

 

[IND151]

good discussion

 

[Meengla]

I don't think Kashmir is solely about water. Religion and culture is a huge issue. Perhaps equal to water.
People in the sub-continent are perhaps particularly emotional about such ties. Anyway, even in case of these emotional ties, the strongest feelings for Kashmir in Pakistan exists in Punjab areas.

Anyway, after last year's flood in Pakistan, I think Pakistan should start out using its resources to use the water it already gets via the Indus and the rains.

 

[Galaxy]

Pakistan should build few dams to store waste water. So much of water is wasted like Flood. Extra water can be used for various other purpose. Don't know why so much mis-management by Pakistan for not storing water ?

 

[Yeti]

Yes it is said water will be the cause of WW3 leading think thanks have shown how water shortages will signal unrest and lead to anarchy.