On 19 October, the Establishment Division issued a notification extending Awais Manzur Sumra’s additional charge as Secretary of Water Resources for another three months. He already serves as Secretary of Climate Change and Environmental Coordination. The office of Pakistan’s Commissioner for Indus Waters, the country’s official representative on the Indus Waters Treaty with India, is also being held on an additional-charge basis by Syed Muhammad Mehar Ali Shah, a senior officer of the same ministry.
"Additional charge" is civil service shorthand for asking an officer who already holds one full-time post to run a second alongside it, usually for a few weeks while a regular appointment is made. Yet at a time when India has placed the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance, in plain terms, declared itself no longer bound by it, and the government calls that a threat to national security, Pakistan has neither a dedicated Federal Secretary for Water Resources nor a full-time Commissioner for Indus Waters. Both jobs are being performed as second jobs. There is nothing unlawful about such arrangements. But when a temporary bridge becomes the permanent road, it reveals priorities. These are not posts that can wait indefinitely.
Consider first the Secretary's office. Under the Rules of Business, the Secretary heads the Water Resources Division: major development projects, federal financing, and coordination with bodies such as WAPDA, which builds our large dams, and IRSA, which distributes river water among the provinces. His ministry is also the secretariat of the National Water Council, chaired by the Prime Minister, a body the 2018 National Water Policy requires to meet at least once a year. It met in October 2018. It has not met since. Climate change is a major portfolio in its own right. So is water. One officer now carries both, and temporary convenience cannot indefinitely substitute for the attention each deserves.
The Commissioner's office is the deeper wound, and its story is much longer. Pakistan has not had a regular, full-time Commissioner for Indus Waters since January 2018. What began that February as a three-month additional charge was extended by the Cabinet in 2020, despite the Cabinet's own directive that a regular appointment be made by March of that year, and an Establishment Division notification of September 2024 still described the arrangement as additional charge. Almost nine years. A post created by international treaty has been run as a part-time assignment for nearly a decade.
The Treaty, signed in 1960, divided the six rivers of the Indus system, gave Pakistan the waters of the three western rivers, the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, allowed India limited upstream use, and created mechanisms for exchanging river data and resolving disputes. It survived wars and decades of mutual suspicion. India's April 2025 decision to hold the Treaty in abeyance did not give it the ability to switch off our rivers overnight; its infrastructure cannot do that. The real dangers lie in the timing of flows, the construction of upstream projects, and the loss of reliable information from across the border. Anyone who has farmed knows that the date water arrives matters. A crop needing irrigation this week gains little from a generous supply next month. For a vast irrigation system, uncertainty over timing can be almost as damaging as uncertainty over quantity.
The defence of our rivers can depend on an engineer's calculations and a response submitted on time, not on occasional attention from an officer whose primary duty lies elsewhere.
The Treaty was never a guarantee of abundant water. It was a guarantee of rules. Those rules are now being challenged. Pakistan has won an important legal ruling. On 31 August 2026, a Court of Arbitration constituted under the Treaty's own dispute provisions ruled unanimously that the abeyance had no valid legal basis and that the Treaty remains in force. The same day, it ordered interim measures limiting construction at Ratle, a large hydropower project India is building on the Chenab. India rejected the Court's authority.
The ruling matters. But winning a legal argument and securing compliance are two different things. A judgment does not inspect a dam, measure a changing river or answer an unanswered technical question. That work is the Commissioner's daily business. His office examines every Indian hydropower project on our western rivers, scrutinises designs, analyses flows, raises objections and prepares the technical evidence on which our treaty rights depend. The Treaty itself, in Article VIII, requires both countries to maintain a permanent commissioner, ordinarily a senior engineer competent in hydrology and water use.
The work is also time-bound. When India shares a new project's design, Pakistan ordinarily has just three months to examine it and raise objections. Silence can mean Pakistan is deemed to have no objection. The defence of our rivers can depend on an engineer's calculations and a response submitted on time, not on occasional attention from an officer whose primary duty lies elsewhere. In July, Mehar Ali Shah told a Senate committee that normal official communication with India had broken down and that hydrological data, the daily river-flow and reservoir measurements behind our planning and flood warnings, was no longer being shared. This is where the absence of dedicated leadership stops being an administrative matter. In late August 2025, India released water from the Salal dam into the Chenab without the customary warning; Punjab's disaster management authority confirmed it received no official intimation. The monsoon that followed killed more than a thousand Pakistanis and affected nearly seven million. I am not arguing that a full-time Commissioner would have stopped a flood. I am arguing that the mechanism built to warn us had no full-time custodian at our end, at the very moment we needed it most.
The contrast with India is unflattering. India fields a vast technical establishment, its Ministry of Jal Shakti and Central Water Commission, with a full-time Commissioner heading a permanent treaty office. Pakistan's capable but much smaller office is headed on additional charge. The issue is not merely numbers; it is continuity, institutional memory and preparation. Treaty defence is not one argument before a tribunal but a continuous record of observation, objection and evidence, accumulated over years. Nor is the challenge confined to the eastern border. Groundwater is falling, reservoirs are silting, farmers face rising uncertainty. Much of that is provincial business, but federal coordination still demands consistent leadership, whatever India does.
Having served as Punjab's irrigation minister, I have seen how easily a delay in one office becomes a problem far from Islamabad. Decisions postponed or taken without adequate technical advice can impose costs for years; in treaty matters, even longer. This is not an argument against the two officers concerned. Both may be performing their responsibilities diligently. Mehar Ali Shah brings valuable technical experience, and a good stop-gap can be preferable to an unsuitable appointment. But that cannot justify making temporary arrangements permanent. If qualified officers are available, why have regular appointments not been made? If they are hard to find, what has the government done to develop the expertise these offices require?
Nor will filling two vacancies, by itself, resolve the problem. A Commissioner needs engineers, hydrologists, data analysts and legal specialists who can examine upstream projects and prepare credible evidence; a Secretary needs the professional support to turn approved policy into action. Creating another bureaucracy is not the answer; equipping the existing one is. The remedies are neither mysterious nor beyond the means of a government that calls water security a national priority: regular appointments within a defined period, a properly resourced treaty cell, and a National Water Council that actually meets.
Pakistan has demonstrated that it can fight serious legal battles over the Indus Waters Treaty and secure important rulings. It has repeatedly declared that its water rights are non-negotiable. Surely a government capable of mounting an international legal defence can find the administrative will to appoint dedicated leadership and resource the offices behind that defence. India has challenged the framework governing Pakistan's western rivers. Pakistan has rightly insisted upon its rights. Yet the two offices central to federal water leadership and treaty implementation remain without dedicated, regularly appointed incumbents. A country cannot describe water as a matter of national survival while treating those offices as administrative afterthoughts. Water security is not an additional charge. It is a permanent obligation.