Crops hit, dams at dead level: Pak water crisis deepens after India's Indus move
The production of kharif crops - cotton and maize - has declined by over 30 per cent and 15 per cent in Pakistan, respectively. The production of wheat - a rabi crop - has also dropped by around 9 per cent owing to the water shortage in the country.With the agricultural industry, especially the kharif outputs impacted, its overall share in Pakistan's GDP dipped to 23.54 per cent in fiscal 2025 from 24.03 per cent the previous financial year.advertisementThe situation is expected to deteriorate in the upcoming weeks, especially as India undertakes regular desilting and flushing its dams in Jammu and Kashmir to enhance its own storage capacity. Additionally, with the monsoon still weeks away, IRSA has warned of a 21 per cent water shortage in the early kharif season and 7 per cent towards the end.Pakistan has been relentless in its efforts to convince India to reinstate the Indus treaty. Last week, India Today reported that Islamabad wrote as many as four letters to Delhi, urging the latter to reconsider its decision to stop the treaty before Operation Sindoor. Sources told India Today TV that Pakistan also requested the World Bank, which brokered the deal, to intervene in the matter. However, the global body refused to mediate in the matter.The Indus Waters Treaty allocates the eastern rivers - Ravi, Beas and Sutlej - to India and the western ones, such as Jhelum, Chenab and Indus, to Pakistan. Responding to the water move last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi firmly said that water and blood cannot flow together.India is also strengthening its water infrastructure, aimed at bettering its domestic storage and strategic hold over the shared waters. This includes new canal projects connecting Beas to Ganga and Indus to Yamuna.Trending Reel
IN THIS STORY#Operation Sindoor#India-Pakistan
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Hindustan Times
13 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
After Op Sindoor feat, 14-15 countries have demanded Brahmos: Rajnath Singh
Defence minister Rajnath Singh on Sunday said during the Operation Sindoor, Brahmos Missile played an outstanding role and today 14-15 countries have demanded the missile. Singh said this at an event in Lucknow, his Lok Sabha constituency, where he released a postage stamp dedicated to former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Chandra Bhanu Gupta (1902-1980) at the National PG College. Defence minister Rajnath Singh (centre), UP deputy CM Brajesh Pathak (left) and president, Motilal Memorial Society, Kunwar Ujjwal Raman Singh, who is the Congress MP from Prayagraj, at an event in Lucknow on July 13. (Sourced) On the occasion, he also inaugurated a hall and paid floral tribute to the statue of CB Gupta on his birth anniversary. Gupta served as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh for three terms. Addressing a gathering, Singh spoke about Gupta's contributions to the state. He described the former CM as an epitome of service, simplicity and honesty who set high standards in politics. During the event, Singh shared a personal anecdote about how Gupta had supported him during his election campaign when he was just 26 and was contesting assembly election from Mirzapur. 'The former CM not only addressed a rally in my support but also provided a financial assistance of ₹5000,' Singh said. The defence minister emphasised that whenever the glorious history of Uttar Pradesh is discussed, Chandra Bhanu Gupta's name is always mentioned prominently. Talking about Operation Sindoor, the Indian Army's operation against Pakistan after the Pahalgam attack in Kashmir, he said: 'During Operation Sindoor, Brahmos Missile achieved a miraculous feat.' 'Now, around 14-15 countries want to have this missile,' Singh said. He added that Brahmos will be produced in Lucknow. Recently, Singh and CM Yogi Adityanath had inaugurated the Brahmos missile facility in the state capital. 'The Brahmos plant will also generate employment for locals,' Singh said. He also pointed out that due to improved law and order situation in the state, no criminal can roam freely today. 'Uttar Pradesh is writing a new chapter today in every aspect, including law and order,' he added. Deputy CM Brajesh Pathak, president, Motilal Memorial Society, Kunwar Ujjwal Raman Singh, who is the Congress MP from Prayagraj and was a minister in the Samajwadi Party government, and president, Bharat Sewa Sansthan, Ashok Vajpayee, a former minister in the state government and former Rajya Sabha MP, were present on the occasion. Besides, BJP MLAs OP Srivastava and Yogesh Shukla, Lucknow mayor Sushma Kharkwal, Rajya Sabha MP Brij Lal, general secretary, Bharat Sewa Sansthan, JN Mishra and general secretary, Motilal Memorial Society, Rajesh Singh were also there. Among others who participated in the event included chief post master general, UP Circle, Pranav Kumar, director postal services, Lucknow, Anand Kumar Singh, district BJP president Anand Dwivedi, BJP MLCs Mukesh Sharma, Mahendra Singh, Ramchandra Pradhan, Diwakar Tripathi, Trilok Singh Adhikari, Raghvendra Shukla and Praveen Garg.
Hindustan Times
21 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Jaishankar's first China visit in 5 years, a look at Beijing-New Delhi ties since then
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar is set to travel to China, his first visit to the country in five years as India and China aim to resolve ties that soured in 2020 with the Galwan Valley clash. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar is visiting China this week, his first visit to the country since the 2020 Galwan Valley clash.(Getty Images via AFP) The visit is also crucial as it comes weeks after China's military support to Pakistan during the India-Pakistan conflict triggered by the Pahalgam terror attack that left 26 civilians dead. Jaishankar, who is on a two-nation tour, was reportedly scheduled to arrive in Beijing on Sunday evening after wrapping up his Singapore visit. While in China, Jaishankar will attend a meeting of foreign ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Foreign Ministers' in Tianjin on Tuesday, and will also hold bilateral talks with his counterpart Wang Yi. As Jaishankar visits China, a look back at five years of India-China relations: Galwan Valley clashes The bilateral relationship between India and China hit a six-decade low with a military stand-off along the Line of Actual Control in May 2020. A seven-hour deadly conflict on June 15 led to the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers, including a commanding officer. While Beijing initially only acknowledged casualties without disclosing numbers, reports said the Chinese army possibly suffered more than twice the casualties as India. It was the first deadly conflict between Indian and Chinese along the LAC in 45 years, plummeting the bilateral ties significantly. Over four years after the clashes began, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly decided to reactivate several mechanisms to resolve the border issues when they met on the sidelines of a summit in Kazan in October 2024. Soon after, India and China announced a breakthrough in terms of patrolling along the LAC arrangements along eastern Ladakh to resolve their stand-off in Depsang and Demchok, negotiating an agreement to resolve their military dispute. China's Pak-backing move against India Even as the two countries said they were attempting to ease tensions fuelled by the military standoff from 2020, the Chinese military supported Pakistan during its recent conflict with India. Not only did China come out in support of Pakistan following the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack that killed 26 civilians on Indian soil, it also provided military support to Pakistan after the launch of India's Operation Sindoor, targeting terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and POK. According to India's Deputy Chief of Army Staff Rahul R Singh, 81 per cent of Pakistan's military hardware used was manufactured by the Chinese. "Few lessons that I thought I must flag as far as 'Operation Sindoor' is concerned. Firstly, one border, two adversaries. So we saw Pakistan on one side. But the adversaries were two and if I would say actually four, or three actually. So, Pakistan was the front face. We had China providing all possible support," the deputy chief of army staff was quoted as saying by news agency ANI. While China did condemn the Pahalgam terror attack saying it "opposed all forms of terrorism', it did say it supported its close ally Pakistan in safeguarding its sovereignty and security. Even after New Delhi and Islamabad announced ceasefire following a three-day military conflict in May, China openly vowed support to Pakistan in defending its 'national sovereignty and territorial integrity'. A statement from China's foreign ministry said, Wang called Pakistan an 'ironclad friend' and vowed to deepen the 'all-weather strategic cooperative partnership' between the two countries. With India and China sharing a tumultuous relationship over the past few years, it would be noteworthy to see if Jaishankar's visit leads to any constructive dialogue between the two countries. The External affairs minister's visit also follows visits by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval in June.
Scroll.in
an hour ago
- Scroll.in
How the river flows: There is another way the Indus Water Treaty can help defeat terror
In the estimate of the popular mood in India, Operation Sindoor was a resounding success, despite some losses. Accordingly, most, if not all, 'objectives' were handsomely met in a four-day blitzkrieg of aerial bombing, systematic targeting, drone strikes and an unrelenting info-war on cable TV and social media. This 'robust' military response of the Indian government to state sponsored cross-border terrorism, however, rests on an uncomplicated assumption: that the enemy only listens when given a ferocious dose of pain and fear. Of course, there are contrary views, as there should be in a nation of 1.4 billion people. It has been pointed out, for example, that since the only business of the terrorist is death, can you really scare them with more deaths? If a revenge version of the doctrine of shock and awe does not prevent cross-border terror, will weaponising the Indus Waters Treaty be a better bet? The Indus Waters Treaty, it bears remembering, was a momentous river sharing agreement signed in 1960 between India and Pakistan with the World Bank playing the role of an honest broker. The Treaty was unprecedented in not only categorising the Indus system as comprising a collection of national rivers but also divisible into two 'national' halves. While the use of the Western rivers (Chenab, Jhelum and the Indus) were awarded to Pakistan, the waters of the Eastern flows (Sutlej, Beas and the Ravi) were assigned to India. These flows were now to be regulated with provisions, laws, rules, articles and even mechanisms to arbitrate likely disputes. In the post-colonial dispensation, the Indus and its tributaries were thus principally valued for their role in nation-making rather than viewed as geological forces, critical to sustaining varied environments within the basin. In this new imagining built around the idea of the national river, India becomes the upper riparian. But within the same reckoning, on her eastern flank, India is now the lower riparian to China and becomes the middle-riparian in the section where the muscular flows of the Brahmaputra unravel between the Tsangpo gorge and deltaic Bangladesh. Nation-making has thus inescapably turned all South Asia into a checkered political waterscape and therefore what happens on the Indus cannot stay on the Indus. Weaponising rivers But how and who got it into their heads that the Indus Waters Treaty could be weaponised? Some observers trace the moment to September 2016 when four heavily armed men of the Jaish e Mohammed slipped into the headquarters of an Indian army brigade that was stationed near Uri, a town which lies in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir. In the subsequent pre-dawn fire fight, 17 Indian security personnel were killed with close to twice the number being gravely injured. Amidst the intense anger and under pressure to act, Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose the Uri attack to make what was clearly a calculated remark that ' blood and water can't flow at the same time '. Implying, in the unambiguous metaphor, that the Indus Waters Treaty was now an active ingredient in an evolving counter-terror strategy. The Modi government's brinkmanship over the Indus Waters Treaty was quick to also tap into an already existing disquiet. Over the years, numerous Indian security analysts and regional strategists had been loudly declaring in many fora that India had been served up short by the 1960 Treaty. In the opinion of the hawkish Indian political analyst and columnist Brahma Chellaney, the Indus Waters Treaty was unacceptable as 'No other water-sharing treaty in modern world history matches this level of generosity on the part of the upper-riparian state [India] for the lower-riparian one [Pakistan]'. The regional expert Uttam Sinha likened the Indus Waters Treaty in 2019 to being an 'albatross' around India's neck as it remains unfairly ' tied to … provisions that were laid down in 1950 '. In contrast, the late Ramaswamy Iyer, one time secretary to the Government of India and a leading water expert in his time, stoutly defended the Indus Waters Treaty by terming it a relatively successful legal-technical arrangement which also 'possessed in-built mechanisms' for resolving conflicts. And whatever vulnerabilities did trouble the treaty, he averred, drew mostly from the continued build-up of misperceptions and political distrust between the governments of Pakistan and India. Put differently, it was the politics rather than the Indus Waters Treaty that needed to be fixed. Environmental historians and rivers In contrast to the huffing and puffing over contemporary geopolitical anxiety, environmental historians (the new kids on the block) have put forward a very different understanding. Daniel Haines in Rivers Divided argued that India and Pakistan worried most about stabilising territorial claims within the freshly drawn political borders, following their respective independence from British colonial rule in 1947. While India drew upon the notion of 'absolute sovereignty', implying that all rivers flowing within its territory became exclusively Indian flows. Pakistan argued for the principle of 'prior appropriation', meaning that the past usage of the Indus waters for their canal networks entitled them to have prior claims over the rivers. That is, Pakistan sought to privilege history while India believed that rights flowed from geography. The Indus rivers, in other words, were always going to be haunted by the new geopolitical tensions that were freshly unleashed by decolonisation and nation-making. David Gilmartin's Blood and Water, in a detailed study of the Indus basin reminds us that the region prior to the 19th century was, in fact, thickly peopled by nomadic, transhumant and pastoral tribes, who seasonally migrated between the surrounding hills and the interfluves (bars). It was only following the consolidation of British rule, that the basin got re-imagined as a howling desert that required large scale irrigation engineering projects. The vast semi-arid flood plains ─ sandwiched between the Indus and Gangetic River systems ─ were consequently turned into settled agricultural zones. Beginning with the Upper Bari Doab Canal (1859) and the Sirhind system (1882), the colonial irrigation drive climaxed with its 'most ambitious' irrigation project ─ the Triple Canal Project (1916). By the early decades of the 20th century, the Indus system was one of most engineered geographies in the world, with a massive grid of channels, diversion structures, dams, weirs and drainage lines. A once heterogeneous collection of people and places had, in effect, been radically transformed through imperial science, hydraulic technologies, cement and quantitative hydrology into a smoothened landscape dominated by landed property and settled commercial agriculture. Put simply, before the Indus River system was turned into national entities, the flows had been organised as a 'colonial resource regime' , which in the main involved damming and controlling the rivers through a vast artificial network of canals. Unsurprisingly, when the Radcliffe Line announced a hard border between India and Pakistan in August of 1947, the complex web of interconnected flows was unravelled and disarticulated. In the newly created political boundaries, it became the case that several diversion structures, regulators and dams fell on different sides of the border from the canals they had previously diverted waters into. To contain the sudden eruption of a crisis over water amidst the pell-mell of 'partition' – the brutal violence that erupted following the large-scale shuffling of people between India and Pakistan – both sides quickly settled on what was called a 'Standstill Agreement', which was to maintain all existing flows till March 31, 1948. The Agreement, however, failed its first test when on the day it lapsed (April 1st, 1949) the then incipient government of India with great alacrity 'suspended' all supplies. Though flows were eventually restored after 18 'long days', Pakistan had been indelibly 'seared' by the shock. While the division of the Indus system into national rivers not only instantly ignited fresh disputes, colonial engineering legacies and the emerging politics of decolonisation further undermined the region's complex hydrology. In the words of the brilliant Pakistani geographer Majed Akhter, the newly minted countries particularly ignored the ' hydrological bonds ' or 'hydrologic interconnectivity' between the various tributaries and within the basin region. Governments, in other words, even as they fought over the quantity of waters remained blind to viewing the rivers as qualitative ecological processes. River ecology emerges From the 1980s, the belief that rivers are merely moving masses of water has, in fact, been conceptually challenged. In the changed framework, rivers are more carefully studied as geomorphologic, chemical and biological processes that are made up of a rich mosaic of habitats which make aquatic life possible. It is now widely understood that variable flows create and maintain a range of ecological relationships between the channel, floodplain, wetland and the estuary. Wetlands, moreover, are important nursery grounds for fish and provide habitats for various kinds of flora and fauna. The Indus basin in such a reckoning can be thus more meaningfully grasped as a weave of ecological webs that entangle Pakistan and India within a single inter-connected environmental bloc rather than as nations divided by rivers. This shift in perspective which treats rivers as a 'natural endowment' brimming with ecological services instead of a 'natural resource' to be dammed and diverted becomes particularly significant in the contemporary context of global warming. As a natural endowment, the Indus River system moreover is no longer limited to being a captive of the expertise of the engineer. Instead, it can now be assessed more broadly through a whole slew of different knowledges. That is, the river can be assembled as a multi-dimensional entity through conversations between biologists, ecologists, local histories, fishing groups, ichthyologists, farmers, irrigators and so on. In other words, the quantitative engineering vision gets decentered with an emphasis, in turn, on understanding the varied ecological and social qualities that makes up flows. Such a perspectival shift to an ecological river, moreover, acquires considerable significance in the contemporary context of global warming. Increasingly, there are growing alarms about climate uncertainties: receding glaciers and the palpable increase in extreme weather events such as heat waves, extraordinary flooding or intense droughts. In 2010, for example, Pakistan witnessed an unprecedented climate shock. Following the unusual halting of an entire jet stream over the western Himalayas sometime in July of that year an intense precipitation episode followed. Such was the intensity that four months of rainfall fell, by one estimate, in the span of a few days. The devastation brought on by the 'great floods' of 2010 proved to be mind boggling. In one survey, 21 million people were declared as having been impacted. Close to 1,700 people or more perished and 1.8 million homes were damaged or destroyed. In its wake, the floods also rummaged through 2.3 million hectares of standing crops and brought about a loss of $5 billion to the agriculture sector alone and another $4 billion to physical and social infrastructure. In sum, climate change impacts in the very near future will not be trifling and are expected to engulf the entire basin region. Climate change and infrastructures for peace The need and urgency to mitigate climate change impacts will demand basin level strategies such as technical coordination, social cooperation and the building of high levels of trust to develop and sustain resilience capacities. Close to 300 million people currently inhabit the Indus Basin region, which stretches across the countries of Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and India. Of these, the major share of 47% and 39% of the populace are in Pakistan and India, respectively. To talk of weaponising the Indus Waters Treaty, therefore, is not only being entirely unmindful and irresponsible in the face of the broader basin wide threats that climate change impacts will bring, but it will also undermine the urgent efforts to speedily help South Asia overcome its flawed and troubled colonial resource and river control legacies. Recovering the idea of the ecological river and developing the notion of flows as natural endowments will, in fact, be crucial to how hopeful futures for a climate impacted region can be envisioned. On the other hand, will creating a large-scale humanitarian crisis in Pakistan by abrogating the Indus Waters Treaty or haphazardly scrambling flows stop terrorism? If the horrors inflicted on the people of Gaza by an arrogant Israeli government is any indication, the world at large rapidly loses sympathy for any state action that targets innocent women and children for crimes created by armed men. Instead, both countries have it within their means to turn the Indus Waters Treaty into an 'infrastructure for peace'. That is, by reimagining the intricate river network as sources for resilience and cooperation across the Indus basin, constituencies for peace can be created. Is this sounding too idealistic and impractical? There is no magic bullet against terrorism and the only real meaningful strategy is to make violence politically unsustainable. If war is not a real option, then only peace is possible.
