UNJournal Lee Sung Jun | NEW DELHI — When India and Pakistan signed the Indus Waters Treaty on September 19, 1960, it was widely hailed as a landmark achievement in international water diplomacy, brokered by the World Bank amid one of the world's most fraught bilateral relationships. More than six decades later, however, the agreement faces mounting scrutiny — not for what it accomplished, but for what critics describe as a fundamentally inequitable architecture that systematically disadvantaged India from the outset.

A detailed analysis of the treaty's negotiating history and operational record argues that India entered the agreement in a spirit of genuine conciliation, only to find its goodwill codified into lasting structural concessions that Pakistan has since exploited to obstruct Indian development and shape international opinion against New Delhi.

An Unequal Division
The Indus River System comprises six major rivers — the Indus, Chenab, Jhelum, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej — flowing through the territories of both countries and sustaining the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people. Under the treaty's allocation formula, India received exclusive rights to the three eastern rivers, while Pakistan was granted rights over the three western rivers, which carry the vast majority of the system's total flow.

In volumetric terms, the eastern rivers allocated to India carry approximately 33 million acre-feet of annual flow, compared to roughly 135 million acre-feet in the western rivers awarded to Pakistan. The resulting split — approximately 80 percent to Pakistan and 20 percent to India — meant that India did not gain new water access through the agreement. Rather, it received formal recognition of flows it already used, while relinquishing all claims to the far larger western system.

Compounding this, the treaty imposed a series of design and operational restrictions on India's permissible uses of the western rivers within its own territory, including strict limits on storage capacity, irrigated cropped area, and hydropower infrastructure specifications. No equivalent constraints were placed on Pakistan.
Paying to Give Away Water

Perhaps the most striking provision of the treaty is financial. India agreed to pay approximately £62 million — estimated at around $2.5 billion in present value — as compensation to fund water infrastructure in what is now Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Critics argue this payment represents a unique and anomalous precedent: the upstream country, having already surrendered the overwhelming majority of the shared water system, additionally subsidised the downstream country's acceptance of an arrangement that disproportionately favoured the latter.

The negotiating record adds further context. When the World Bank put forward its first substantive proposal in February 1954, India accepted it almost immediately, demonstrating a clear preference for swift resolution. Pakistan, by contrast, withheld formal acceptance for nearly five years, until December 1958. During this interval, India remained bound by the emerging framework's restrictions while Pakistan continued to develop new uses of the western rivers without equivalent constraints. Analysts argue this established a troubling precedent — that obstruction yielded better outcomes than cooperation.

A Treaty Used as a Tool
Since the treaty's signing, Pakistan has made extensive use of its dispute resolution mechanisms to challenge virtually every significant Indian hydropower project proposed on the western rivers, including Baglihar, Kishenganga, Pakal Dul, and Tulbul. Critics contend that these challenges have served less as genuine legal disputes than as instruments of developmental delay — in some instances, Pakistan acknowledged the potential benefits of Indian projects for downstream flood moderation while simultaneously opposing them.
In parallel, Pakistani officials and diplomatic channels have promoted a narrative portraying India as a potential "water aggressor," leveraging India's own record of treaty compliance to suggest a threat that the record does not support. India, the analysis notes, has not committed a single verified violation of the treaty — not during the wars of 1965 or 1971, not during the 1999 Kargil conflict, and not at any subsequent point in the agreement's operational history.

The consequences for India have been tangible. Vast areas of Rajasthan that could have been brought under irrigation remain arid. Jammu and Kashmir, which sits directly astride the western rivers and possesses substantial hydropower potential, has seen that potential remain largely undeveloped — constrained by treaty restrictions, Pakistani legal challenges, and the deterrent effect of prolonged arbitration. Local communities in the region have grown increasingly critical of the treaty, viewing it as an external imposition that prevents development of resources flowing through their own territory.

A Reckoning Deferred

The analysis argues that the broader context of bilateral relations can no longer be ignored. The treaty was concluded in a declared spirit of goodwill and friendship — a premise that critics contend has been comprehensively undermined by decades of Pakistani state-sponsored cross-border militancy, culminating most recently in the April 2025 attack in Pahalgam. Bilateral agreements, the argument goes, cannot be selectively honoured: a state cannot breach foundational norms of inter-state conduct while demanding that its counterpart continue fulfilling disproportionately burdensome treaty obligations.

India's recent decision to hold the treaty in abeyance has drawn international attention and controversy. Proponents argue it represents a long-overdue assertion that international agreements require reciprocal good faith to remain binding in practice. Critics warn of potential humanitarian consequences for downstream populations dependent on consistent river flows.

What is not in dispute is that the Indus Waters Treaty, long held up as a model for transboundary water management, has entered a new and uncertain phase — one that forces a reexamination of the assumptions on which it was built, and the terms on which it has operated for more than half a century.