- India considering the plan to expand the channel in the Chenab River assigned to Pakistan.
- Delhi weighed other projects that could reduce the flow of water in Pakistan.
- India suspended participation in the Treaty of the Water of the Indo after the Kashmir attack.
India is considering plans to drastically increase the water that extracts from an important river that feeds the Pakistani downstream farms, as part of the reprisal action for a deadly attack of April against tourists that New Delhi blames Islamabad, according to four people familiar with the matter.
Delhi suspended his participation in the 1960 Indo Water Treaty, which governs the use of the Indo River system, shortly after 26 civilians in illegally occupied Indians Jammu and Kashmir (Iiojk) were killed.
Pakistan has denied participation in the incident, but the agreement has not been revived despite the fact that the two neighbors with nuclear weapons agree a high fire last week after the worst fighting between them in decades.
After the attack of April 22, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, ordered the officials to accelerate the planning and execution of projects in the Chenab, Jhelum and Indus rivers, three bodies of water in the Indus system that are mainly designated for the use of Pakistan, six people told Reuters.
One of the key plans in discussion implies duplicating 120 km from the length of the Ranbir channel in the Chenab, which crosses India to the Punjab agricultural power of Pakistan, two of the people said. The channel was built in the nineteenth century, long before the treaty was signed.
India can extract a limited amount of chenab water for irrigation, but an expanded channel, which experts said it could take years to build, would allow him to divert 150 cubic meters of water per second, compared to approximately 40 cubic meters currently, the four people said, citing official discussions and documents they had seen.
The details of the Deliberations of the Indian Government on the expansion of Ranbir have not been previously informed. The discussions began last month and continue even after the high fire, said one of the people.
The Indian ministries responsible for water and foreign affairs, as well as the Modi office, did not respond to Reuters‘ questions. The Indian NHPC hydroelectric energy giant, which operates many projects in the Indo system, also did not respond to an email in search of comments.
Modi said in a burning speech this week that “water and blood cannot flow together,” although he did not refer to the treaty. The spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of India, Randhir Jaiswal, told journalists on Tuesday that India “will keep the treaty in suspense until Pakistan is in a credible and irrevocable way that he reduces his support for cross -border terrorism.”
Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar told legislators this week that the Government had written to India arguing that suspending the treaty was illegal and that Islamabad considered it in force.
Islamabad said after India suspended the treaty in April that she considered “any attempt to stop or divert the flow of water belonging to Pakistan” as an “act of war.”
About 80% of Pakistani farms depend on the Indo system, as well as almost all hydroelectric projects that serve the country of about 250 million.
Any effort of Delhi to build dams, channels or other infrastructure that retained or diverted a significant amount of india system flow to India “would take years to realize,” said water security expert, David Michel, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies based in Washington.
But Pakistan has had a preview of the type of pressure he could face from India: water at a key reception point in Pakistan briefly fell to 90% in early May after India began maintaining maintenance work in some Indo projects.
Threatened success
The Indo system crosses some of the most geopolitically tense areas of the world, which originate near the Manascarvar lake in the Tibet and is winding through the north and southeast of India, the east and southeast of Pakistan, before emptying in the Arabian sea.
The treaty is widely seen as one of the most successful agreements to share the water in the world, since it has survived several important wars and long -standing tensions between India and Pakistan.
Islamabad has previously opposed many Indian projects in the Indo System, while Delhi said after the Iojk attack that he had been trying to renegotiate the treaty since 2023 to give an account of the increases in the population and its growing need for clean hydroelectric energy.
The treaty largely restricts India to establish low -impact hydroelectric projects in the three rivers assigned to Pakistan. Delhi is free to use the waters of three rivers, the tributaries of Sutlej, Beas and Ravi, as it considers it convenient.
Together with the plans to expand the Ranbir channel, India is also considering projects that would probably reduce the flow of water to Pakistan of rivers assigned to that country, according to two government documents seen by reuters and interviews with five people familiar with the matter.
A document, a note without a date prepared by a government company for officials who consider irrigation plans, suggests that Indo’s water, Chenab and Jhelum “are potentially distributed in rivers” in three states in northern India.
One of the people said the document, whose details have not been previously informed, was created for discussions with officials of the Ministry of Energy after the April 22 attack.
Delhi has also created a list of hydroelectric projects in its Jammu and Kashmir territory that hopes to expand the capacity to 12,000 megawatts, compared to the current 3,360mw.
The list, which was created by Power’s ministry and seen by Reuters, was not dated. A person familiar with the document said it was created before the Kashmir incident, but that government officials are actively discussing.
Prospective projects also include dams that can store large volumes of water, in what would be the first time for India in the Indo River system, according to two people familiar with the matter.
India has identified at least five possible storage projects, four of which are on tributaries of Chenab and Jhelum, according to the Ministry of Energy document.
Political disputes
International Relations Expert Happymon Jacob at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi said that India’s new approach in the swing of the Indo’s waters reflected an attempt to pressure Pakistan on Cashmiro.
“With the last conflict, Delhi can refuse to discuss Cashmira with Pakistan in any format,” he said. “Delhi has not only reduced the scope of bilateral conversations, but has also reduced the agenda, focusing only on specific issues such as IWT.”
Pakistan has said that he is preparing legal actions in several international forums, including the World Bank, which facilitated the treaty, as well as the Permanent Court of Arbitration or the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
“Water should not be armed,” said Finance Minister Muhammad Aurengzeb Reuters Mondays. “We do not even want to consider any scenario that … does not take into account the restoration of this treaty.”
Michel, the United States headquarters, said the concern for the suspension of the treaty was not limited to Islamabad.
“As the geopolitical competence throughout the region deepens, more than a few Indian observers fear that Delhi’s use against Islamabad runs the risk of licensing Beijing to adopt the same strategy against India,” he said.
