South Asia’s Water Stress Test

Flash floods in Jammu & Kashmir expose the fragility of the Indus Water Treaty that has long kept the peace between India and Pakistan.

Just before dawn on August 17, the skies above Kathua district in Jammu & Kashmir split open. A sudden cloudburst over Jodh Ghati unleashed torrents of water and debris that tore through villages, flattening homes, cutting off roads and swallowing fields. At least seven people died, dozens were injured and many more were left stranded. Helicopters of the Indian Army scoured the valley to airlift survivors, while rescuers dug through mud and rubble.

Such tragedies are no longer rare in the Himalayas. Once freak events, cloudbursts today have become a grim seasonal certainty. They dump more than 100mm of rain in under an hour, overwhelming slopes and settlements. This year alone, four such downpours struck the subcontinent: two in India - in Kishtwar and Kathua - and two across the border in Pakistan. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has long warned that South Asia’s mountains will suffer “intense precipitation events.” In Kathua, the geography is anyway fragile and the margin for survival is rapidly narrowing.

Yet in Jammu & Kashmir, water has always been a political, strategic and international flashpoint. The Ujh and Ravi rivers, which swelled in the Kathua floods, form part of the Indus basin governed since 1960 by the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT). That agreement, brokered by the World Bank, divided the basin: India would control the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej); Pakistan the western ones (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab). For decades, the IWT was hailed as one of the world’s most durable water-sharing pacts, surviving wars, coups and diplomatic freezes.

But every fresh disaster sharpens anxieties across the border. Pakistan has long fretted over India’s hydropower projects and diversion plans, fearing they could starve its farms of water. Flash floods muddy the picture further: what begins as a deluge in an Indian valley today can echo as allegations of manipulation in Pakistan tomorrow. Nature’s fury blurs into geopolitical suspicion.

This year has already provided a glimpse of how fragile the treaty’s mechanisms can be. In April, following a terrorist attack in Pahalgam, India temporarily suspended treaty obligations. Releases from the Baglihar and Salal dams were halted. Hydrological data, which Article IV of the treaty requires India to share during “extraordinary discharges,” was withheld. The pause lasted only weeks, but in Islamabad the reaction was incendiary. Officials branded India’s actions “acts of war” and even threatened to suspend the Simla Agreement, the fragile framework that underpins bilateral relations. Talks resumed by mid-May, but the episode underscored how quickly technical cooperation could be sacrificed at the altar of politics.

The truth is that India cannot, as populists sometimes demand, simply “turn off” Pakistan’s rivers. The engineering infrastructure simply does not exist, nor would international law allow it. Even short disruptions or withheld data, however, can magnify downstream disasters. Floodwaters do not wait for diplomatic thaw; they surge where they please.

Meanwhile, climate change is making the IWT look increasingly outdated. Its designers assumed that Himalayan hydrology would remain relatively stable. They focused on allocations and rights, not adaptation. Storage provisions, once sufficient, now look meagre. Processes that require arbitration panels or neutral experts struggle to match the pace of cloudbursts that unfold in minutes. In Kathua, rainfall totals for the season were technically ‘normal.’ But averages conceal extremes.

The paradox is glaring. Disasters such as Kathua’s could be an opportunity for cooperation. Joint flood forecasting, real-time data sharing, and basin-wide risk mapping could save lives on both sides of the border. River basins ignore the line of control. The same torrent that sweeps away a house in Jammu may submerge fields in Punjab the next day. Yet instead of recognising this shared vulnerability, India and Pakistan view every dam, every data point, through a lens of suspicion.

The disputes are not theoretical. India’s Baglihar and Kishanganga projects were both contested through the IWT’s cumbersome dispute-resolution machinery. Arbitration may suffice for questions of megawatts and diversion volumes but are hopelessly slow against cloudbursts and glacial surges. Natural disasters demand agility. The treaty provides bureaucracy.

What Kathua reveals is simple but urgent. The IWT was crafted to divide rivers fairly. Its future may depend on managing them jointly under stress. The next frontier is not allocation but adaptation. Without provisions for climate volatility, the treaty risks becoming an artefact, celebrated for its past endurance but irrelevant to present needs.

The implications stretch beyond bilateral ties. South Asia’s security architecture rests on fragile bargains. Water is central to both countries’ economies: Pakistan depends on the Indus for 90 percent of its food production, while India’s hydropower ambitions rely on mountain rivers. In this context, the treaty is more than a water-sharing pact. It is a test of resilience for the basin, for the two states and for diplomacy itself.

Every flood chisels away the IWT’s credibility. For when mountains weep and rivers rebel, treaties are no longer ink on paper. They are living compacts, to be renewed or broken with each storm. The next cloudburst could come sooner than either government expects. The question is whether it will wash away another village or the last vestiges of trust in the Indus Waters Treaty.

(The author is a Mumbai-based educator and an expert on the Indus Waters Treaty. Views personal.)