War over water

Ecological implications be damned. India and Pakistan use rivers as strategic weapons against each other.

Zubair A Dar 

 
Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf may not have been right about a lot of things, but he was, when he predicted that the Indo-Pakistan Indus Water Treaty – brokered by the World Bank in 1960 – contained the “germs of a future conflict”. Interestingly, four of the six rivers of the Indus water basin flow through Kashmir’s mountains and valleys from Tibet and water the plains in India and Pakistan. And Kashmir, whose water resources have been divided between India and Pakistan under the Treaty, is the ground zero of this dispute between the two neighbours. 

The latest in the series is Kishanganga hydel power project that National Hydroelectric Power Corporation Limited plans to build near the Line of Control in north Kashmir. The project draws water out of river Kishanganga (more popular as Neelam in Kashmir) near Habba Khatoon pass and stores the water in a 37 m high concrete face rock-fill dam at Gurez before further supplying it to the 330 MW underground powerhouse at village Kralpora. The water is then released into Wular Lake. 

Pakistan says this transfer of water has legal as well as ecological consequences. It maintains that India, under the Treaty, can store water but cannot divert it, because India must release as much water downstream as it stores. Union Water Resources Minister, Saif-u-Din Soz, told TSI that the objection has already been addressed and the design has been changed to a run of the river project. 

But that is not the only objection Pakistan has. In its normal course, Neelam meets Jhelum near Dumail after meandering into PoK near Gurez, where it acts as the de facto line of control for a few kilometres. Pakistan maintains that the inter-tributary transfer, as envisaged in Kishanganga project design, shall force a crop change in a vast belt in PoK. Pakistan also says that India should stop constructing the powerhouse as substantial investment has already gone into the construction of its 969 MW Neelam-Jhelum power project in PoK, being constructed with the help of a Chinese consortium. Here, Pakistan’s position is again favoured by the Indus Water Treaty, which lays down that if the two countries plan two projects on the same river, the country that has made a substantial investment will be favoured. 

Besides these, NHPC’s 2005 design displaced a major portion of Dard Shin tribe by submerging seven of its villages in Gurez valley. To top it all, the NHPC design was not economically viable. Following objections by Pakistan and criticism by environmental groups, India reduced the height of the dam and the quantum of water stored in it, thus minimising the displacement of the community. 

But, Pakistan sees a bigger game in India's plans to construct the powerhouse. On November 24 last year, Pakistan's Indus Water Commissioner Jamaat Ali Shah stated that India would make Pakistan a barren land in the next six years. Shah was pointing to the blocking of water by another controversial power project, Baghlihar, whose dam height had made Pakistan approach the World Bank for arbitration. 
 
India, however, is not deterred by any such objections. "We have satisfied ourselves that we are not violating the Treaty. We got a survey done by our experts who went to Pakistan, and through remote sensing. There is no question of loss to agriculture," says Soz. 

Both countries now eye the meandering Chenab River. Although, most of the river lies in Pakistan, its headwaters lie in India's portion of Kashmir. The Baghlihar dam has been constructed on the same river and Pakistan is apprehensive that India could use it for strategic purposes besides others. NHPC has identified eight other sites on the river for hydroelectric projects. In constructing Kishanganga, India again has an opportunity to take strategic advantage. Union Minister of State for Power, Jairam Ramesh, during his visit to Kashmir last year said that NHPC will have to work faster on the Kishanganga power project in the wake of Islamabad's efforts to complete Neelam-Jhelum project on the other side of the LoC by 2015. It is not just the urgency in power generation that made the cabinet committee on economic affairs hurriedly approve the upward revised cost of the Kishanganga project at Rs 3,642 crore. Diversion of water towards Wular Lake will mean that the long proposed navigation lock on Wular can be built and water levels raised by several feet. It will also feed the Uri II power project during winter when water levels recede. 

Pakistan has long been objecting to the navigation lock terming it as the de facto storage of water from Jhelum and its tributaries. At a time when Pakistan's water availability has decreased to 1,200 cubic metres per person from 5,000 cubic metres in 1947 and is forecast to plunge to 800 cubic metres by 2020, Pakistan may soon approach the International Court of Justice in Hague for resolving the issue. 

But India intends to go ahead despite the threat. "Wular is a lake and there is no question of holding water. We want a lock of five feet for winter navigation," Soz told TSI, adding that Pakistan's objections are an "unnecessary exaggeration". "They (Pakistan) are welcome to move the International Court." 

Meanwhile, with the Treaty itself becoming a major conflict, Kashmir is emerging as the biggest loser. The result is that in J&K, only 40 per cent of the cultivable land can be irrigated and just 10 per cent of the hydroelectric potential harnessed as ability to store, divert and regulate water have been put out of bounds. To top it all, Kashmir remains a power-starved state despite the fact that NHPC, which earned Rs 2,300 crore in the last fiscal, has half of its assets in J&K where it has three major projects, including Salal that fetches it the cheapest energy. 

With the festering Kashmir conflict far from being resolved, water appears to be the next big reason for punch-ups between the nuclear neighbours. And, no wonder that the two countries may one day go to war over water and not territory. 

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