Heading Off Environmental Disaster on the Indus River
How India and Pakistan Can Improve the Basin’s Sustainability
Transboundary river management gets very few headlines — but few other mechanisms are more important for maintaining the health of Earth’s longest rivers, such as the Mekong and the Indus.
Unfortunately, transboundary river management too often fails to take into account ecosystem health. In the Indus, for instance, a longstanding treaty between India and Pakistan focuses on approval of infrastructure projects instead of how agriculture might result in groundwater depletion in the basin. In a recent opinion piece in Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper, Pakistan-based water and climate change expert Ali Tauqeer Sheikh argued that “the Indus ecosystem is fast becoming a global environment disaster, only much bigger than that of the Aral Sea.”
Future H2O director John Sabo interviewed Sheikh, former director of the NGO Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD) Pakistan, about transboundary governance of the Indus and how it might be improved.
John Sabo: In your piece for Dawn, you call India’s approach to river planning “imperial,” “built upon the British colonial tradition of disregarding the integrity of ecosystems,” and leading to the Indus ecosystem “fast becoming a global environmental disaster.” On the other hand, you say that Pakistan lacks a clear water vision and is simply focused on engineering tactics. What might provide a better model for transboundary water management for these two countries?
Ali Tauqeer Sheikh: This is the hardest matter. The Indian subcontinent is one of the most heavily populated regions of the world. It’s also intensely agricultural — instead of two seasons, farmers crop for three seasons, which has all sorts of impacts on the ecosystem. But the present government’s approach in India is to create a big vat of inter-river linkages. Transferring water from one river system to the other is, in my view, tinkering with the ecosystems, and that has been disastrous in many instances.
Nature has to be a winner; the river has to be a winner. The rivers have right to life. And both India and Pakistan as nation-states have to be winners. Which essentially means that we should think of benefits that we can share equitably and sustainably.
Neither country is unhappy with the treaty that binds them over the Indus. But instead of focusing only on engineering questions such as whether the height of a piece of infrastructure is permissible under the treaty or not, we need to focus on equitable sharing. And we need to be fundamentally committed to and more forward-looking on how best we can protect the ecosystem, rather than simply dividing rivers and waters. That’s the key to sustainability into the century that lies ahead for us all.
John Sabo: When you say we need to protect ecosystems in the Indus Basin, which ecosystems are you talking about?
Ali Tauqeer Sheikh: Several million people live on both sides of the river. Rivers have provided their livelihoods, their folklore, their culture and their history. When the out-of-basin diversions happen, the rivers die and the reliance on groundwater increases. If the cropping patterns are not very sustainable and are water-intensive — with crops such as cotton, sugarcane, rice and even exotic flowers and vegetables — the rate of extraction becomes higher than the recharge rate. That is the sad story on both sides of the river, in modern India and modern Pakistan.
Nature has to be a winner; the river has to be a winner. The rivers have right to life. And both India and Pakistan as nation-states have to be winners. Which essentially means that we should think of benefits that we can share equitably and sustainably.
— Ali Tauqeer Sheikh
The ecosystem of the river has given birth to a civilization for thousands of years, as well as to a diverse and unique set of species. They are stakeholders as well — it is not just users and consumers on both sides of the border. A certain percentage of water must be protected for environmental recharge and connections.
John Sabo: To play that back to you, I would say that when you say “ecosystem,” you are talking about the watershed in the context of a coupled human-natural system. That’s an interesting argument — I’ve always wondered how the treaty seems equitable from the human side, but just devastating from the river’s side. To have three rivers that are barraged at the border and don’t flow into Pakistan is killing three rivers as you said.
You wrote in your Dawn piece that the region’s water policy makers “continue to be tragically uneducated and utterly untarnished by contemporary knowledge on ecosystem-based approaches to transboundary water matters.” Why is this and how do we change it?
Ali Tauqeer Sheikh: At one level, it’s very simple: the hydrology is not well understood. Only water quantities are understood. Water has been quantified in the same way as a drinking water bottle that we buy at the marketplace. But policymakers have not understood what water means strategically in terms of hydrology, in terms of hydraulics, and in terms of how best it can continue to serve successive generations as well as the ecosystem.
How do we change this? The starting point is what we are teaching policymakers. If you look at five generations of negotiators from both sides, they’re all engineers. They are stuck in the old British traditions and we have not updated them. They are not aware of how other transboundary river situations all across the world have found different creative ways of engaging upstream and downstream or upper or lower stakeholders in win-win propositions.
India and Pakistan now have less of a treaty and more of a divorce settlement over the Indus — you take the sofa and I take the dining-room table. You can’t approach ecosystems like this.
— Ali Tauqeer Sheikh
South Asia does not lack in intelligence. But we have not tried to define the problem in substantial terms. Sometimes I feel we are still fighting like cousins in the 1947 partition period. We now have less of a treaty and more of a divorce settlement — you take the sofa and I take the dining-room table. You can’t approach ecosystems like this.
The treaty is still relevant — it has helped us survive through the crisis and wars and conflicts. The treaty does not forbid us to be progressive and forward-looking. It authorizes new joint research and new propositions to be brought to the table. But we are locked in a zero-sum relationship. We’re still extremely childish in sharing data with each other. We need neutral spaces and university-led initiatives to advance understanding and promote collaborative research and data collection. A professor at the University of Sussex who is supervising a student from India or Pakistan will probably know more about our datasets than we would sitting in New Delhi or in Islamabad. That is a sad reality we need to overcome.
John Sabo: Do you think data exchange would provide an opportunity for better transboundary policymaking — and what do you see is the mechanism there? Who is going to make the first move?
Ali Tauqeer Sheikh: Definitely. But in the present environment of suspicion, that won’t happen. A dataset that I can buy commercially from a satellite, or that my counterpart in India can buy from a commercial satellite — we don’t even share the details of those. There is deep distrust on both sides. We must find some ways to do trust building.
I think the first few steps have to be extremely modest as a confidence-building measure. Whatever datasets are available in the public domain, even on the internet by NASA or others, even those can be shared in a newsletter that goes to both sides.
It’s absolutely critical that we begin to put in place an early-warning system, to protect human lives from floods. It’s not terribly expensive to exchange certain data in a collaborative way by using the good offices of institutions such as yours, who enjoy credibility or can build good credibility in both countries.
John Sabo: On the policy piece: in the U.S., the binational committee that oversees the Colorado river going into Mexico has an instrument of policy flexibility called “minutes” that allow for changes to the agreement to be made. Is there a similar type of instrument that you think would work in the case of Pakistan and India that would allow for the rebirth of the river?
Ali Tauqeer Sheikh: It is very difficult. The logic is that every drop of water that under the treaty belongs to India should be used by India. That is correct but only to a limited extent — the treaty has given right to India to use the water in three eastern rivers — but no treaty will be valid or acceptable if it says that you are given the right to kill a river. The right is to use water, but not to kill rivers. There needs to be space for environmental flows.
If environmental flows can be calculated in River Murray Darling based on last 130 years of data, it can also be done for Indus and its tributaries. If we can agree on the methodology (or react to a methodology) to determine the minimum required to keep an ecosystem alive even if we initially agree on the nominal levels, that in itself is an excellent starting point.
No treaty will be valid or acceptable if it says that you are given the right to kill a river. The right is to use water, but not to kill rivers. There needs to be space for environmental flows.
— Ali Tauqeer Sheikh
But there are also two arguments at play beyond this. One: the efficiency level. If country A is more efficient in its water use, we should not be giving more water to country B that is less efficient. That’s a fair, economically sound argument. But efficiency along with environmental use is a complete argument. Efficiency alone is not a complete argument when it comes to river ecology and hydrology.
Example: in my view, any piece of infrastructure, no matter how innocuous, will at some point adversely impact downstream flows. Studies suggest that the Indus delta in Pakistan annually needs about 10 million acre-feet of water to flush through its system to maintain its ecosystem health and prevent salt-water intrusion. That’s the minimum that we need to maintain, and it requires rapid flow. We don’t achieve that now, except in monsoon months. We need a comprehensive approach on both sides of the border to maintain that flow. We shouldn’t have crops like paddy rice or sugarcane which cannot be competitively grown in either country.
John Sabo: It’s the same in the Mekong — the water that comes from China is really important for the health of the Mekong Delta. As climate change creates new extremes of flooding, is there an opportunity to capture monsoon flows in the three eastern rivers for groundwater recharge?
Ali Taqueer Sheikh: Out-of-basin diversions from River Ravi, Beas and Sutlej leave very little or no downstream flows to Pakistan. In rare cases when the monsoon is very heavy, then some downstream flows towards Pakistan are possible, but that is becoming a rarity. We have identified almost a dozen wetlands along the Indus across Pakistan which need to be preserved and protected and developed for harvesting of monsoon waters. Some of them are large; some of them can be much larger than they are presently and would require investment to get there. But that is the easiest ticket to recharging aquifers that we will have in the short term.
Can we reduce groundwater depletion due to agriculture by encouraging less-thirsty crops to be grown during the dry season on both sides? We need some modeling to guide our cropping pattern.
— Ali Tauqeer Sheihk
A much more difficult approach: can we reduce groundwater depletion due to agriculture by encouraging less-thirsty crops to be grown during the dry season on both sides? We need some modeling to guide our cropping pattern. This is not an easy thing to do, particularly since it’s getting more complicated due to the changing monsoon patterns. Because of climate change, the availability of water is becoming less predictable. We need in-depth research on how much water is required, the timing and which crops can contribute to reducing water depletion.
