Averting Water Wars in Asia

Dec 28, 2016 | Brahma Chellaney
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Water is a precious resource, for which there is no substitute. One-third of the people in the world facing water stress or water scarcity live in India, which generously signed a treaty in 1960 reserving over 80 per cent of the waters of the six-river Indus system for its adversary Pakistan. Since then, water shortages in India’s Indus basin have become acute, triggering silent water wars between states in the north. The paradox is that India has failed to tap its treaty-allocated 19.48 per cent share of the Indus resources. Averting water-related conflicts is actually a major challenge across Asia, which has less freshwater per capita than any other continent, except Antarctica.