India’s recent suspension of engagement under the Indus Waters Treaty marks a dangerous turn — not just diplomatically but conceptually. In its move to pull out of treaty meetings, New Delhi has signalled that water is no longer a shared ecological concern but a strategic asset. This shift toward weaponising rivers — long feared but seldom admitted — is being formalised. And while Pakistan rightly pushes back against such unilateralism, its own water discourse is sliding down a similar slope.
The logic of control, not stewardship, is what travels downstream. As India builds more infrastructure to store and divert river flows in Kashmir, Pakistan frames its opposition in nationalistic terms: this is our water; India must not hold it back. Yet within Pakistan, the same logic of ownership, not ecological responsibility plays out in interprovincial rows. Nowhere is this more visible than in Sindh, where outrage over Islamabad’s plan to build six new canals under the Green Pakistan Initiative (GPI) is spilling onto the streets.
The protests have caught on quickly. Rallies, road blockades, and media campaigns are pressuring the Centre to back away from what many in Sindh see as a Punjab-dominated grab of river resources. But scratch the surface, and the problem isn’t just about upstream diversions. It’s also about what Sindh is unwilling to look into: its canals, its cropping patterns, its silence on ecological ruin — all of which speak volumes.
The Indus River is in crisis. Pakistan receives roughly 142 million acre-feet (MAF) of surface water annually, with about 90% of it consumed by agriculture. Punjab takes the lion’s share — about 55% of the total — and Sindh comes next at around 34%, according to the latest IRSA data. These numbers have long been at the heart of bitter wrangling between provinces. But what is often glossed over is how that water is used.
Pakistan cannot credibly call out India for strategic control of rivers while ignoring its internal collapse of water governance
Pakistan’s agriculture is hopelessly inefficient. Over 60% of irrigation water is lost before it even reaches the crop, due to outdated flood irrigation, canal seepage, and evaporation. Of the roughly 48,000 km of canals, losses of up to 40% from head to tail are not uncommon. And the crops being grown — rice and sugarcane in particular — are wildly unsuitable for a water-stressed country. Each acre of sugarcane guzzles over 4 acre-feet of water, while much of the rice grown is export-oriented, not for domestic food security.
Sindh, too, is neck-deep in these contradictions. While the province cries foul over federal canal projects, it has 11 major canal systems of its own, many of which feed lands controlled by powerful landlords growing the same thirsty cash crops. Not one protest leader is calling for regulating these internal canals, let alone converting them to drip irrigation or shifting away from water-intensive cropping. The entire movement is built around clinging to the provincial share, not rethinking how that share is being squandered.
Ecological concerns have been pushed aside. The Indus Delta — once supported by 35 MAF of freshwater annually to flush out seawater and sustain biodiversity — now receives less than 0.5 MAF in most years. That’s a 99% drop. The result is catastrophic: seawater intrusion has destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres, displaced fishing communities, and wiped out mangroves. But this slow death of the delta has not fired up protests in the way that perceived Punjabi encroachment has. It’s not ecology that’s driving this outrage. It’s provincialism.
At the heart of it all is legitimacy — or the lack of it. The GPI, spearheaded by the military and executed by a federally-backed government whose electoral mandate is disputed, is seen as a top-down imposition. With the PTI sidelined, its leaders jailed, and election transparency in tatters, even rational development projects are bound to be mistrusted. When you shut out democratic representation, you open the door for reactionary forces to fill the vacuum. That’s what’s happening now.
India’s posture gives Pakistan a chance to rally global opinion — and rightly so. But Pakistan cannot credibly call out India for strategic control of rivers while ignoring its internal collapse of water governance. You can’t fight off one hegemon while nurturing mini-hegemons at home.
The Indus Waters Treaty may have kept the peace for over six decades, but its spirit — that of cooperation, shared ecology, and transboundary fairness — is being eroded on both sides. India has turned away from it. Pakistan is chipping away at it internally, by treating water as a political currency, not a lifeline.
If Pakistan is to stave off ecological disaster, it must do more than fend off external threats. It must clean up its act, reach out across provincial lines, and bring ecology back into the centre of its water politics. Until then, the Indus will keep bleeding — not from foreign hands, but from the unwillingness of its custodians to see the river as a shared inheritance, not a political prize.