Islamabad/New Delhi, May 19 Despite placing the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) in abeyance following the heinous April 22 Pahalgam terror attack last year, India has not halted the water flow from the western rivers earmarked for Pakistan.
Additionally, nearly five to six per cent of the total water from the three eastern rivers allocated exclusively to India under IWT continues to flow to Pakistan owing to diversion and storage constraints on the Indian side, a report has detailed.
According to a report in Eurasia Review, Islamabad is merely crying wolf over the IWT issue, which it said explains why neither Pakistan’s complaint regarding the treaty being put on hold nor Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir’s threat to bomb Indian dams has been taken seriously.
“Islamabad is trying to peddle the narrative that India is responsible for its water woes, but the ground reality is entirely different. Various organisations monitoring global water availability had predicted more than a decade ago that Pakistan would face a severe water crisis by 2025 in case the government didn’t get its act together,” the report detailed.
“The fact that Pakistan hasn’t been able to augment its scanty water storage capacity of 30 days and this squarely puts Islamabad in the dock,” it added.
The report noted that Islamabad sought intervention from the UN Security Council, claiming that New Delhi’s suspension of the IWT could lead to “grave peace, security and humanitarian consequences”.
In a bid to influence the UNSC and attract "global sympathy", it said, Islamabad simultaneously projected a doomsday scenario, claiming that the country's water availability was only sufficient for only 90 days.
Questioning the credibility of the claim, the report said, "This raises a question – if the situation is as precarious as Islamabad is making it sound, why was the letter to UNSC on this issue signed by the Deputy Prime Minister and not the Prime Minister of Pakistan himself?’
Highlighting Pakistan’s lack of meaningful efforts to curb water wastage, the report quoted former head of Pakistan’s meteorological services Qamar-uz-Zaman as saying that “From within its usage for agriculture, Pakistan wastes two-thirds of its water by following archaic agricultural practices.”
The report noted that Pakistan stores just 10 per cent of its annual river flows, far below the global average of 40 per cent, while its poorly maintained Indus basin irrigation canal system suffers about 25 per cent surface water transmission losses.
Senior Pakistani military official Jamil Muhammad, describing the gravity of the situation, warned that “While Pakistan is not acutely short of water in the physical sense, neither does it have an abundance of the resource to afford the luxury of mismanaging it – especially amid its escalating water demands.”
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