A Warming Himalaya is Changing Indus Basin. The '60 Treaty Wasn’t Built for This

Can a framework drawn up over six decades ago manage a river basin whose behaviour is changing, asks Pratik Kad.

The Indus Waters Treaty was signed in 1960, when the glaciers, snow cover, and rivers of the Himalaya were generally understood as relatively stable features of the landscape. More than six decades later, that assumption is becoming harder to sustain, writes Pratik Kad.

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The Indus Waters Treaty was signed in 1960, when the glaciers, snow cover, and rivers of the Himalaya were generally understood as relatively stable features of the landscape. More than six decades later, that assumption is becoming harder to sustain.

The political dispute between India and Pakistan over the treaty is usually discussed in terms of water sharing, hydropower, and national security. But another dimension that deserves much greater attention is that the physical river system itself is changing.

As a climate scientist working on mountain climate and hydroclimate, I find this increasingly important in the Indus debate.

Mountain temperatures have risen, snow cover is changing, glaciers are losing mass, and the timing of runoff is shifting. At the same time, intense rainfall, landslides, rock and ice failures and large sediment pulses can create hazards for infrastructure.

These are not conditions that the engineers who designed the original treaty could have anticipated in the way we understand them today. This does not make the treaty irrelevant. It raises a more practical question: can a framework negotiated more than six decades ago provide enough flexibility to manage a river basin whose climate and physical behaviour are changing?

The River System Has Changed

The treaty's basic structure is well known. India received unrestricted use, subject to treaty provisions, of the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas and Sutlej) while Pakistan received the western rivers (Indus, Jhelum and Chenab), with specified rights for India to use their waters, including for hydropower under defined conditions.

The treaty also established mechanisms for hydrological data exchange and dispute resolution.

Its survival through decades of political tension is significant. But the durability of an agreement does not mean that every engineering assumption behind it remains unchanged.

One of the less visible challenges is sediment.

The Indus system drains some of the world's youngest and most geologically active mountains and carries enormous quantities of sediment.

For hydropower infrastructure, this is not simply a nuisance. Sediment can accumulate around intakes, affect turbines, reduce storage capacity and complicate safe operation.

Modern hydropower projects therefore need ways of managing sediment and responding to changing river conditions. That can sometimes involve altering reservoir levels or using controlled sediment-management techniques. At the same time, projects on the western rivers must comply with detailed design and operational provisions under the treaty.

This raises an engineering question that is often buried beneath the political argument: how should infrastructure be operated safely when the river's characteristics are changing?

The Kishenganga and Ratle projects illustrate this difficulty. Pakistan has challenged aspects of their design, while India has argued that the treaty permits run-of-river hydropower projects subject to specified conditions.

It is therefore too simplistic to describe these projects as attempts by India to 'control' the western rivers.

Run-of-river projects do not have the enormous storage capacity required to simply stop downstream flows. The more substantive issue is the degree of operational and engineering flexibility available to India while remaining within the treaty.

Climate Is Rewriting the Risk

Climate change adds another layer of uncertainty.

A warming mountain environment does not produce one simple change in river flow. It affects snow accumulation and melt, glacier mass balance, the timing of runoff and the balance between snowfall and rainfall.

At the same time, intense precipitation can generate sudden runoff, landslides and large sediment pulses.

It is important not to attribute every Himalayan flood directly to climate change. Floods, landslides, and avalanches have always occurred in these mountains. What is changing is the climatic and cryospheric background in which these hazards occur, and in some cases their intensity, timing, or combination.

The high-altitude disaster in Nepal in August this year provided a stark reminder of how quickly these processes can interact.

Although it occurred outside the Indus basin, the event showed how a failure high in the mountains can develop into a destructive downstream flood involving water, rock, and sediment. A rock or ice collapse can trigger an avalanche, block a river, mobilise sediment, and subsequently release a powerful surge downstream.

The Indus does not need to experience precisely the same sequence for the lesson to be relevant. Infrastructure in the Himalaya has to be designed and operated with the entire catchment in mind, rather than treating water, glaciers, precipitation, slopes and sediment as separate problems

When Infrastructure Meets a Changing River

This is why the Indus debate should not focus only on how much water India can use or how much Pakistan receives.

Water allocation remains central to the treaty, but managing a river in a warming mountain environment is also a question of risk.

The scientific and technological capacity available today is vastly greater than it was in 1960.

Satellites can monitor snow, glaciers, and glacial lakes. Automated stations can provide continuous observations. Weather and hydrological models can provide increasingly detailed forecasts of rainfall and river flows. Sediment monitoring can help operators understand how catchments are responding to extreme events.

Yet, the value of these tools depends on whether the information can be collected, shared, and acted upon in time.

A delayed hydrological observation may be of limited consequence during a normal season.

During a rapidly developing flood, timely information can mean the difference between receiving a useful warning and receiving none at all.

The treaty already provides for hydrological data exchange. The opportunity now is to make that exchange more useful for a climate in which extreme events and rapidly changing mountain conditions are becoming more important.

From Water Sharing to Risk Sharing

There is also a need to distinguish between water allocation and infrastructure safety.

If changing sediment conditions require a hydropower project to modify its sediment-management practices, that should first be examined as an engineering and environmental question.

If new glacier, snow or rainfall-related hazards emerge, information about those risks should be available to both sides.

This does not mean ignoring legitimate security concerns. It means recognising that not every technical problem is a strategic manoeuvre.

A similar distinction is needed when discussing India's ability to influence flows in the western rivers.

There is a tendency in public debate to suggest that India can simply “turn off” the Indus. It cannot. Existing run-of-river projects do not have the storage capacity required to suddenly eliminate downstream flows.

India's influence is more gradual and structural: through the development and design of infrastructure, storage within permitted limits, reservoir operations, sediment management, and the availability of hydrological information. That is where a serious discussion about water security should begin.

Beyond 1960

The Indus Waters Treaty does not necessarily need to be discarded because it is old. Its central principle of providing a predictable, rule-based framework for managing a shared river remains valuable. But the physical assumptions surrounding that framework cannot remain frozen in 1960.

A more contemporary approach could retain the treaty while strengthening the systems around it: more timely hydrological data exchange, improved flood forecasting, coordinated monitoring of glaciers, snow and glacial lakes, better sediment observations, and regular scientific assessments of climate-related risks to water infrastructure.

Such measures would not resolve the wider political disagreements between India and Pakistan. They would not eliminate disputes over hydropower projects. But they could make it easier to address genuine engineering and environmental problems without turning each one into another geopolitical confrontation.

The need for such an approach is becoming more apparent as the Himalayan environment changes.

The Indus basin is not simply a set of rivers divided by a political agreement. It is a connected mountain system in which changes upstream can affect communities and infrastructure far downstream.

Floods do not stop at an international boundary, and sediment do not follow political borders. Snow and glacier melt do not respond to treaty language.

The treaty was built around the river conditions of its time. We now have to manage the river conditions of ours.

This does not require abandoning the past. It requires recognising what has changed, and building enough scientific and institutional flexibility into the system to deal with what comes next.

(Dr Pratik Kad is a climate scientist specialising in climate dynamics, extreme events, and impacts. He serves as Vice-President of APECS, an Executive Committee member of YESS, and a working group member for WCRP's Regional Information for Society (RIfS). This is an opinion piece and views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse nor is responsible for them.)