IT might sound like a new thought to some, but the idea of giving rights of personhood to rivers is actually an old one.

It has recently been advanced by the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum in a rally to mark International Rivers Day in Hyderabad, and is worth taking a closer look at.

The original idea, as a pure legal theory, originated in the early 1970s to get around a problem in environmental litigation: who has the right to bring a complaint, or a suit, in a matter involving the degradation of nature?

Rights groups argued that since the law requires that the complainant first establish what negative impact he or she has experienced from any given action, groups doing advocacy for the environment found it hard to fight their battles in the courts since they had a difficult time establishing precisely how they had suffered any damage from the activity they were contesting.

So the idea was to grant rights of personhood to nature itself.

It was not until 2006 when the first precedent was set in Pennsylvania (US), quickly followed by Ecuador in 2008, then Bolivia and New Zealand and most recently India.

The theory is finding widespread acceptance now, and its implementation has helped to enable the law to become a tool with which to protect nature from degradation, pollution and the destructive impact of human activity.

Now a nascent demand has been made to grant rights of personhood to the Indus, and it is coming from a group that has its livelihoods directly tied to the river.

The river has been ‘imprisoned’ by mega projects, they argue and its waters are so heavily polluted that the livelihoods of those who depend upon it are now threatened.

For too long, we have looked upon the Indus river system as nothing but a ‘natural endowment’, or a source of wealth and driver of growth for our economy.

It is indeed all these things, but it is also much more.

Rivers, like everything else in nature, need the space to regenerate themselves, and renew their vitality.

In using the river system for industrial and agrarian purposes, it is important for the law to provide the space to protect it from the damaging effects of human activity.

Granting rights of personhood is one tool being used around the world for this purpose; given local adaptation, it is an idea worth exploring for Pakistan as well.

Published in Dawn, March 16th, 2018