Let rivers flow
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ON Sept 19, 1960, a momentous agreement was signed in Karachi. India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been in power since independence, sat next to the Pakistani president and the country’s first military ruler Gen Ayub Khan. The contrast was striking: the emblem of electoral continuity facing a symbol of military governance. In that room, democracy met dictatorship, and the fate of South Asia’s mightiest rivers was sealed.
Hovering nearby was Eugene R. Black, World Bank president, overseeing a deal that would not only partition rivers but also pave the way for decades of significant development financing in the region.
Under the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) India gained exclusive rights to the eastern rivers: Ravi, Beas and Sutlej and Pakistan retained control over the western rivers: Indus, Jhelum and Chenab.
To the world, it looked like a model of water diplomacy, brokered effectively by the World Bank. Behind the scenes, however, it marked the beginning of a slow ecological shift and solidified the bank’s influential role in the region’s development trajectory.
While brokering the peace, the World Bank also positioned itself centrally in the treaty’s implementation. It established and administered the Indus Basin Development Fund, mobilising nearly $900 million (a vast sum then, roughly $9 billion today) from various nations, including India itself, alongside World Bank loans. This fund was crucial for Pakistan to build massive replacement works — like the Tarbela and Mangla dams and extensive link canals — necessitated by the treaty’s water allocation.
The IWT remains technically functional but ecologically flawed.
The IWT firmly established the World Bank as a major development partner, opening up decades of large-scale lending for India and Pakistan’s water management needs. Since joining the bank, both had received billions of dollars in commitments by early 2024. Water-related infrastructure remained a major focus, with projects like India’s Dam Rehabilitation Improvement and Management Project and Pakistan’s Left Bank Outfall Drain. Far beyond diplomacy, the IWT laid the foundation for sustained World Bank financial engagement tied to the region’s divided water resources.
For Pakistan, the ecological consequences were stark. Before the treaty, the Ravi and Sutlej flowed robustly through its Punjab province, nurturing wetlands, fields, and forests. Once India gained exclusive rights, the flows dwindled. The Ravi, passing through Lahore, often became a seasonal drain carrying more effluent than freshwater. Riverine forests died, aquifers depleted, and native fish species vanished. The living rivers became shadows.
Pakistan, compensated financially but deprived ecologically, was forced to rely heavily on the western rivers. The Indus, Jhelum and Chenab were re-engineered with vast canal networks and storage dams. This mechanical redistribution disrupted natural flood cycles vital for soil fertility. Sediment trapped behind dams starved downstream ecosystems, most notably the vast Indus delta. Once Asia’s second-largest, the delta shrank dramatically as seawater intruded deep inland, destroying mangrove forests and rendering farmland saline.
In regional lore, rivers were sacred entities. The Ravi, the ‘mother of gardens’, became toxic. The Indus, the river giving India and Sindh their names, was tamed into a regulated commodity, its wild spirit diminished. The treaty, designed by engineers and bankers, lacked ecological foresight. No provision was made for environmental flows, delta health, or groundwater sustainability. It treated rivers as pipelines, not living ecosystems.
Today, the IWT remains technically functional but ecologically flawed. Climate change adds further stress with melting glaciers and erratic monsoons. Both nations are bound by an agreement ill-suited to current environmental realities.
What if the treaty had prioritised ecological stewardship alongside water quotas?
That missed opportunity remains a burden. But it is also an opportunity to rethink and to frame a new understanding that is based not just on division and engineering, but primarily on the shared responsibility for the health of one of the world’s most vital, vulnerable and culturally significant river systems.
Moving forward requires transcending the purely engineering and financial logic that birthed the 1960 treaty and listening again to the rivers themselves. Because a river silenced doesn’t just stop flowing; it takes memory with it.
The writer is an expert on climate change and sustainable development, and founder of the Clifton Urban Forest, Karachi.
X: masoodlohar
Published in Dawn, May 17th, 2025
