By Mohsin Leghari
When India placed the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 in abeyance in April 2025, the legal dispute quickly acquired a more concrete dimension: an acceleration of infrastructure development on the western rivers. Projects long stalled by design objections, arbitration, or environmental review have entered a phase of heightened urgency, and the pace of construction across the Chenab, Jhelum, and upper Indus basins has visibly quickened.
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The legal position, however, remains unchanged. The Treaty contains no provision for unilateral suspension — a point the World Bank itself publicly confirmed in May 2025. The Court of Arbitration under the Permanent Court of Arbitration, in a unanimous Supplemental Award on Competence issued in June 2025, found that India’s abeyance decision had no effect on the Court’s jurisdiction. By August 2025, the Court had issued a substantive Award on the general interpretation of the Treaty’s provisions governing hydroelectric design, with India declining to participate throughout. A second phase of merits proceedings is now underway. The engineering push and the legal contest proceed in parallel — one on the ground, the other at The Hague.
For Pakistan, the more pressing question has shifted from whether these projects are being built — they are — to what kind of hydraulic influence they will ultimately afford India, and how that might reshape the downstream water supplies on which millions of farmers depend.
The Chenab is the most consequential river in this story. It feeds the Marala Headworks and sustains the vast canal colonies that stretch from Sialkot down to Multan, forming the backbone of Punjab’s agricultural economy. What is taking shape upstream is increasingly a structured power cascade — a series of interconnected hydroelectric projects that, in combination, could enhance India’s capacity to manage river flows in ways not possible with isolated run-of-river schemes.
The most significant project under construction is Pakal Dul, a 1,000 MW facility on the Marusudar, a major Chenab tributary. Unlike conventional run-of-river designs, Pakal Dul incorporates meaningful storage. To put that in perspective: the Chenab carries on average roughly 24 million acre-feet annually over the past 35 years. Pakal Dul’s live storage is approximately 0.04 MAF — less than two-tenths of one percent of that annual flow. Even when combined with the Ratle, Kiru, and Kwar projects under construction, the aggregate live storage of the entire cascade reaches only about 0.06 MAF, or one-quarter of one percent of annual discharge. These numbers are important. They tell us that what is being built cannot block the Chenab, cannot sustain seasonal withholding, and cannot threaten Pakistan with outright water denial. The risk is subtler than that.
Downstream of Pakal Dul, the 850 MW Ratle project is a run-of-river facility with pondage and gated spillways that can regulate daily flows. Between the two sit the Kiru (624 MW) and Kwar (540 MW) projects, limited in storage individually but significant in what they enable collectively: a coordinated staging of releases across the cascade. None of these is a volume-capture dam. Together, they function as timing instruments — capable of influencing not how much water reaches Pakistan, but when it does.
Timing, in an irrigation economy, is everything. Pakistan’s sowing windows are governed by the arrival of water at headworks, not merely its annual volume. A cascade that can compress or delay early-season releases, even modestly, introduces uncertainty into planting calendars that farmers and canal administrations have relied upon for generations. The proposed Sawalkote project, the largest in the Chenab system at 1,856 MW, has not yet been built, but if constructed at full height it would mark a more substantial shift — from distributed daily regulation toward genuine seasonal modulation.
On the Jhelum, the dynamics are somewhat different. The Kishanganga project, operational since 2018, diverts water from the Neelum into the Jhelum basin, creating a permanent structural reduction in flows to the Neelum-Jhelum hydropower project on Pakistan’s side. This is not a question of seasonal leverage but of a lasting baseline shift. The historically contested Tulbul navigation project has also resurfaced in discussions; if completed, it could offer India some capacity for lean-season flow regulation on the Jhelum — modest in absolute terms but potentially significant for winter Rabi irrigation in an already stressed system. The Uri-II project, by contrast, is a straightforward run-of-river scheme with limited basin-wide influence.
In Ladakh, India is advancing smaller hydropower projects on the Indus mainstem. These are primarily aimed at supporting regional grid stability, and no major reservoir construction has been reported that would materially affect downstream flows for now.
A separate concern, distinct from hydropower, is the Ranbir Canal at Akhnoor, which diverts Chenab water for irrigation within India. Reports of potential capacity enhancement introduce a different category of risk: consumptive use, which means permanent volumetric reduction rather than timing modulation. Large-scale inter-basin transfers remain unconfirmed as of early 2026, but the direction of travel warrants attention.
What does all of this amount to? In the immediate term, the answer is measured. Most projects remain run-of-river, cumulative storage is a fraction of one percent of annual flows, and no verified operational capacity exists that would enable seasonal blockade of the Chenab. The hydraulic stranglehold that some commentary has warned of is not imminent.
Over the medium term, the picture is less comfortable. As the cascade is progressively commissioned, India will acquire a genuinely enhanced capacity to shape hydrograph timing — to influence the windows within which water reaches Pakistan’s headworks. The risk is not a dramatic shutoff. It is the slow erosion of predictability.
That risk falls on a system already ill-equipped to absorb it. Pakistan’s irrigation infrastructure is aging, its canal measurement systems are imprecise, its transmission losses are substantial, and its governance frameworks for water distribution remain contested. A system in good institutional health could adapt to moderate upstream timing shifts with careful reservoir operation and demand-side management. Pakistan’s system, as it stands, is more vulnerable than it need be.
The western rivers were allocated to Pakistan on hydrological logic — geography creates downstream dependence, and that dependence warranted a treaty guarantee. Infrastructure can alter the character of that dependence without formally violating its terms, and that is precisely what the current construction programme is doing, incrementally.
Pakistan’s response must be proportionate and strategic. Optimising reservoir operations at Mangla and Tarbela, investing in real-time telemetry and canal measurement, reducing transmission losses, and pursuing serious irrigation governance reform are not merely good housekeeping — they are the foundations of resilience.
The contest ahead is not about outright blockade. It is about predictability. Rivers do not need to be stopped to become instruments of influence. They need only to become uncertain. And in an irrigation-dependent economy, predictability is power.
