India’s decision to place the Indus Waters Treaty in “abeyance” lacks a legal basis. Both the neutral expert process and, more recently, the Court of Arbitration at The Hague have maintained that the 1960 treaty remains in force and cannot be suspended unilaterally by India. Pakistan has welcomed these findings, while India has rejected them.
This has created an unusual situation: the treaty continues to exist legally, but its practical functioning is steadily weakening.
The Permanent Indus Commission, the main bilateral institution responsible for implementing the treaty, has not held a formal annual meeting since 2022. Under the treaty, the commissioners are expected to meet at least once every year to maintain communication, exchange information and facilitate cooperation. Without regular engagement, technical disagreements become increasingly difficult to resolve.
Tensions over the treaty had already been growing before India announced its decision in 2025. New Delhi issued notices in 2023 and 2024 seeking modifications to the treaty, while Pakistan raised objections to the design of Indian run-of-river hydropower projects on the western rivers and pursued dispute-resolution mechanisms available under the agreement. Bilateral negotiations could have provided a more constructive route for addressing these differences.
The treaty itself has limitations. Its division of the six rivers has sometimes encouraged both countries to approach water primarily through competing national claims rather than through management of the Indus Basin as a shared ecological system. Pakistan, however, has understandable reservations about renegotiating the arrangement at a time when India is unwilling to cooperate fully within the existing framework.
Importantly, the treaty already contains room for greater cooperation. Article VII recognises the two countries’ common interest in the optimum development of the rivers and allows further cooperation through mutual agreement. This provision could provide a basis for addressing challenges that were not adequately anticipated when the treaty was signed, including groundwater management, declining water quality and climate change.
India and Pakistan could also develop separate technical protocols and memoranda of understanding alongside the existing treaty. Such arrangements could broaden cooperation without requiring either side to reopen its fundamental provisions.
The Indus Waters Treaty has provided an imperfect but remarkably durable framework for managing water relations between India and Pakistan since 1960. However, the environmental realities of the twenty-first century are very different from those that existed when the agreement was negotiated.
Climate change is transforming the Indus Basin. Changing rainfall patterns and variations in snow and glacier melt are increasing the risks of both floods and water shortages. Reduced freshwater and sediment flows have also placed the Indus delta under growing ecological pressure.
These challenges provide practical areas where cooperation is possible even without resolving the wider political disputes between the two countries. Joint climate monitoring, glacier observation, flood forecasting and improved exchange of hydrological information would benefit both sides.
The immediate task should therefore be to restore the treaty’s institutional mechanisms. Regular meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission should resume, while routine data sharing and inspections should be restored. Once these mechanisms are functioning again, both countries could begin discussing how to make the treaty more resilient to climate change and sustainable over the long term.
India should also move beyond viewing the Indus relationship simply through the lens of an upstream state dealing with downstream Pakistan. The Indus originates in Tibet, while its river system and ecosystems extend across borders. Both India and Pakistan are therefore part of a shared river basin whose environmental deterioration ultimately affects both countries.
The international community, including the United States, can encourage Islamabad and New Delhi to preserve this framework rather than allow water cooperation to become another victim of their security rivalry. Turning a water-sharing arrangement into leverage in an unrelated political or security dispute could weaken one of the few bilateral institutions that has survived repeated crises between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.
The way forward is therefore neither unilateral suspension nor an immediate rewriting of the treaty. The priority should be to restore cooperation, revive its institutions and gradually adapt the Indus Waters Treaty to the climatic and environmental realities of the twenty-first century.
