Imagining Industan

This chapter outlines the volume’s overall content and objectives. It defines the problem of water insecurity in the Indus basin and provides essential background data on the basin’s history, geography, demography, and hydrology. It offers an explanation for the enormous importance of the basin’s water resources to stakeholders at both the state (Afghanistan, China, India, and Pakistan) and sub-state levels, clarifies the relationship between the Kashmir dispute and the waters of the Indus system, supplies an overview of the Indus Waters Treaty, and highlights the geopolitical significance to the international community of the Indus basin’s water resource circumstances. It briefly identifies each chapter’s main focus.

The connection between water scarcity and water security in the Indus Basin is often understood through attention to the decline of physical water supply per capita. But water insecurity at the individual and regional scales is as much about political and social structures as it is about the absolute (or physical) availability of a natural resource. Drawing on insights from the interdisciplinary tradition of political ecology, this chapter highlights the importance of examining the interaction of absolute and structural scarcity in the historically and geographically specific context of the Indus Basin in northwest South Asia (and especially Pakistan and India). This chapter first evaluates the Indus Basin’s ability to meet the basic physiological needs of the human population in terms of absolute supplies of water. The next section argues that the fundamental sociopolitical structures that shape the structural scarcity of water in the Indus can be rooted in the agroecological transformations of the basin since the late nineteenth century. The final section analyzes Indus Basin water security in the context of climate change through attention to the interaction of absolute and structural water scarcity.

This chapter examines the international and domestic costs of noncooperation among and within the countries comprising the Indus basin. Its focus is on all four of the co-riparian basin states, but India and Pakistan receive special attention due to their prominent position in the basin’s water use and management. Besides the international costs, including intensification of traditional enmities, heightened distrust, persistence of territorial disputes, terrorism, and weakening of regional norms of cooperation, this chapter also examines the way in which noncooperation in regard to water resources plays an instrumental role in creating and aggravating the interprovincial and interethnic divisions within basin countries. The bilateral and internal mistrust and suspicions in the basin have restricted the ability of riparian countries to develop critical water development projects like Tulbul Navigation project/Wullar Barrage, Sutlej Yamuna Link Canal, and Kalabagh Dam to make best possible use of available water resources, and this in turn has impacted negatively on the social and economic development of these countries.

A growing body of evidence suggests that domestic water conflicts are not only more prevalent and violent than water conflicts at the international level, they can also have regional and international implications. Using India and Pakistan as a case study, this chapter explores how water conflicts within these two countries affect water relations between them. The chapter uses two forms of research. First, it employs event databases to provide a general overview of the frequency and intensity of water conflict and cooperation both between and within India and Pakistan from 1948 to 2014. Second, it draws on expert perspectives to provide more context and analysis of how water conflicts at these two scales—domestic and international—interact. The chapter concludes that water conflicts within India are largely self-contained and have no bearing on its water relations with Pakistan, whereas water conflicts within Pakistan are closely tied to India’s actions upstream and therefore have a tendency to irritate water relations between them internationally.

While the fact that, despite their strained relations, India and Pakistan managed to negotiate the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) has been widely celebrated as a success, tensions concerning how to share the water resources of the Indus are rising again. The apparent mismatch between analysis and reality is due to the fact that, so far, most scholars have asked the wrong questions when it comes to water security, international law, and the obligation to cooperate. This chapter will introduce a contemporary understanding of water security which goes beyond the narrow state-centered zero-sum game debate and provides a platform for various disciplines to engage in strengthening cooperation over shared waters. This novel lens will then be applied to analyze the legal framework governing the utilization of the Indus. Can the concept of common concern for water security actually be implemented through the IWT? In marrying security studies with international law, potential futures for the legal framework governing the Indus will be illustrated. It is hoped that this chapter will shine a new light on the question whether the IWT is up to the task of providing water security by building a more resilient future for the basin and whether international law has a role to play in bringing about Industan.

Decision-makers in Afghanistan, China, India, and Pakistan must reconcile a host of overlapping socioeconomic, ecological, and policy pressures to ensure their countries’ future water needs. Growing populations and expanding economies are driving rising water demands, even as environmental degradation and unsustainable consumption practices increasingly stretch the shared resources of the Indus River. Climate change will compound the challenges confronting water managers. None of the riparian states can successfully surmount these tests on its own. Greater dialogue and coordination among the basin’s diverse communities offers considerable scope for mitigating mutual threats and generating collective benefits. Collaborative approaches promoting data exchange, capacity building, and knowledge generation can help policymakers and the broader public better apprehend and assess the basin’s complex climate and water challenges. Common frameworks for identifying and adopting policy lessons can enlarge the range of policy choices, scale up best practices, and chart cooperative pathways forward.

Effective regional planning in the Indus basin necessitates greater transboundary data sharing on environmental indicators. Reliable hydrological data across political borders is essential to ensure more accurate and effective risk management mechanisms. Given the high vulnerability of this region to climate change, data sharing through existing regional cooperation organizations such as South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) must be further encouraged. There is potential to also learn from the limitations of the data sharing mechanisms under the Indus Waters Treaty. Recent natural disasters have highlighted the need for urgent action on this matter, and thus the vision of “Industan” is not merely a peace-building ideal but a pragmatic risk management strategy, particularly for India and Pakistan.

This chapter is concerned with how water can be sustainably managed across the Indus basin, focusing specifically on the challenges of surface water management in India and Pakistan. Governments in both countries have laid emphasis on the expansion of hydropower for storage, irrigation, and energy trading, and consequently the politics of water is increasingly implicated in the geopolitics of the Indus basin. Within each country, the control of water varies across time and space and reflects the dynamics of broader power structures such as those related to the relationship of the state to different social groups. The supply-side hydraulic paradigm that has historically predominated in both countries engenders a technocratic institutional culture and securitized discursive environment that is resistant to the voices of nonelite actors. As the private sector has assumed a greater role in hydropower construction, particularly in the Indian Himalayas, there has not been a concomitant shift in the transparency or accountability of water governance institutions, as advocates of economic liberalization suggest there should be.

Clearly, then, accommodating the needs of different stakeholders beyond the status quo requires a challenge to prevailing state-society relations within both India and Pakistan at a variety of scales. In turn, effective basin-wide management will require a transformed institutional culture that is more open to polycentric formations. In arguing that such a change in institutional culture is both desirable and possible, the latter part of the paper highlights the role that multitrack dialogues, education, and media can all play as part of the promotion of a de-securitized basin where peaceful and sustainable relations replace long-standing conflict.

Despite the presence of huge water resources, several factors are contributing to water security issues in Asia in general and southern Asia in particular. From this region flow some of the major rivers in Asia, such as Yangtze, Yellow, Indus, Yarlung Zangbo/Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong, Irrawaddy and others. These rivers drain several million square kilometres and have become lifelines for the food security of billions, apart from transporting goods and services and for industrial development. Countries such as China, India and Pakistan sit on enormous water reserves in this part of the world, and these are in the recent period triggering securitisation of water-related issues due to a number of reasons. China has the fourth largest freshwater reserves in the world. However, due to increasing demands over water use, such resources are being increasingly and extensively exploited for economic purposes. These issues have triggered wide debate among officials, lawmakers, scholars, environmentalists and others. In order to address water scarcity issues, China recently launched several initiatives and programmes such as the South-to-North Water Diversion Project (SNWDP), construction of either water diversion dams or hydropower dams and the like. It is argued in this chapter that while in the overall water discourse of China, the Indus River takes a marginal seat in comparison with other major rivers, China has followed a two-pronged approach, namely, stop-gap understandings on water sharing or, more accurately, water measuring with the immediate lower riparian states, including India, while actively exploring cooperative efforts with the lowest riparian state, Pakistan, in regard to dam construction and hydroelectricity generation, including even eventual protection of these facilities with China’s paramilitary/military forces in the longer run. Thus, cooperative efforts do exist in the Indus basin between China and Pakistan, while in the case of China and India, both cooperative and competitive elements are forthcoming.

The states in the Indus basin region have benefited from international development assistance to varying degrees; however, the history of these initiatives points to approaches that do not consider the basin as a whole or a single unit. This disparity between the social, economic, and technological needs at the basin scale and responses of the international community have as much to do with internal conflicts and discord as with the lack of a cohesive vision on the part of the external interlocutors. This chapter unpacks some commonly made assumptions about engagement of international partners and analyzes how these assumptions broadly fall apart for the Indus basin due to a multitude of external and internal drivers. New development paradigms, emerging from the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change, are assessed for their potential to reshape regional development patterns. It is concluded that regional approaches – which fully engage Afghanistan, China, India, and Pakistan – are the best mode for moving forward to cope with existing and emerging challenges around economic growth; water, food, and energy security; and health and well-being of people living in the Indus basin. The international community can proactively foster such new relationships, but only if the four states are amenable to accepting such interventions.

This chapter summarizes the contributing authors’ main findings about water insecurity in the Indus basin. Recalling the reasons offered in Chap. 1 for the importance of the Indus basin to the world, it also includes the editors’ reflections on the world’s importance to the basin. By “the world” is meant those foreign powers that have had a serious and sustained strategic relationship with one or more of the basin’s four riparian states, as well as the array of governmental and nongovernmental international and regional organizations and institutions that also have lengthy records of interaction with the countries sharing the basin. It also means the world order – the set of institutional arrangements, rules, and norms established internationally to promote stability, changes in which, in this highly interconnected and politically turbulent world, seem certain to impact upon water security in the countries sharing the Indus basin.