Pakistan's water reckoning: BNU Task Force charts the way forward on a crisis decades in the making |
With India's suspension of the Indus Water Treaty and domestic mismanagement eroding Pakistan's reserves, BNU Center for Policy Research (BCPR) – a Lahore-based think tank has issued a comprehensive report entitled "Pakistan's Water Crisis: The Way Forward," suggesting optimum solutions to Pakistan’s imminent water crisis.
The ‘Task Force on Diplomacy and Politics on Water’ that BCPR established in October 2025 brought together diplomats, hydrologists, legal scholars, and international academics to confront a crisis that is simultaneously technical, diplomatic, and existential. The timing of the Task Force was not incidental.
Six months earlier, on April 23, 2025, India announced to hold the IWT in abeyance on the pretext of a terrorist attack in Pahalgam in Indian Occupied Kashmir adding that the suspension would remain in place "until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abjures its support for cross-border terrorism."
For Pakistan, which depends on the Indus River system for roughly 90 per cent of its agricultural water, the move was not merely a diplomatic provocation, but a warning by India that it was was weaponizing water which is a lifeline for Pakistan’s economy and its people.
The Indus Waters Treaty, signed in 1960 with the World Bank as guarantor, divided the six rivers of the Indus Basin between the two countries: India received the three eastern rivers (the Sutlej, Ravi, and Beas) while Pakistan retained the right to unrestricted use of the three western rivers (the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab). The Treaty held even through wars, coups, and crises that would have shattered lesser agreements for the past four decades.
The April 2025 decision to hold the Treaty in abeyance was not an isolated provocation but the culmination of a two-decade strategy by........