IWT: India escaping scrutiny |
ON 16 October 2025, United Nations Special Rapporteurs raised queries regarding India’s controversial actions contradicting the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT).
India has yet to respond to the queries, despite the deadline passing more than ten weeks ago. This non-responsiveness is laced with arrogance and is rightly drawing attention from international observers who view it as reflective of a growing tendency of defiance in the Indian state’s approach toward mutually agreed methods of international scrutiny and legal accountability.
In the post-Pahalgam terrorist attack scenario, the unilateral move of the Modi-led government to hold the IWT in abeyance radiated strong signs of coercive aggression towards the people of Pakistan. Ironically, this irrational move of India had no legal justification as the treaty does not provide any sort of unilateral withdrawal mechanism. This breach of the binding obligations of the IWT has posed multidimensional challenges revolving around human, agricultural and food-security costs for Pakistan.
The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 is a binding international agreement and none of the signatories can suspend it unilaterally on any pretext. By attempting to hold the treaty in abeyance outside the established dispute-resolution mechanisms, India departs from the principle of pacta sunt servanda, the basic cornerstone of treaty law which demands unconditional implementation from signatory states. For Pakistan, whose irrigated agriculture depends on the predictable flow of water from the Indus Basin system, this legal breach translates into material insecurity.
As climate change intensifies hydrological volatility, unlawful treaty disruption magnifies risks to water availability, agricultural stability and national food security. The unilateral abeyance of the IWT strikes at the credibility of the agreement and weakens the predictability that sustains downstream human security, agricultural planning and economic stability. With the erosion of these guarantees, uncertainty is now moving beyond river channels into parched fields, unstable markets, strained household budgets and shrinking food baskets.
The unilateral suspension of the treaty by India is rapidly translating into a human crisis, exposing farmers and rural communities to income loss, unmanageable debt cycles and forced livelihood shifts. Water unpredictability is likely to fracture crop cycles, reduce sowing confidence and cause significant yield losses, which could ripple outward into food shortages, rising prices and worsening rural poverty. Reduced irrigation reliability directly affects nutrition outcomes as lower harvests shrink food diversity, weaken household diets and increase vulnerability to malnutrition among children and women.
Unpredictable and uncertain water availability also strains drinking water access, sanitation systems and public health, raising risks of water-borne diseases and poor hygiene. Treaty instability magnifies climate shocks, accelerating soil degradation, salinity and desertification. Undermining binding water commitments constrains Pakistan’s ability to manage reservoirs, plan irrigation rotations, stabilize energy generation and effectively respond to glacier shifts and erratic monsoon patterns.
The real cost of unlawful treaty disruption is not measured in diplomatic exchanges but in lost harvests, reduced wages, declining nutrition, weakened health resilience and deepening livelihood insecurity. The situation merits deliberate countermeasures from Pakistan to sensitize regional and international stakeholders and seek full implementation of the IWT from the Indian side in order to avert undesired consequences at the bilateral as well as regional level.
—The writer is contributing columnist, based in Islamabad.