Uttam Kumar Sinha

Research Fellow, IDSA, Dr Uttam Sinha's chapter ‘Challenges to the Himalayan Watershed’ was published in the volume ‘Himalayan Bridge’edited by Niraj Kumar, George Van Driem and P Stobdan.

Abstract of the Chapter

This chapter observes the driving forces behind the water demand, on the political obstacles that stand in the way of river cooperation and the behaviour of riparians in the backdrop of the changing Himalayan hydrology.

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A global temperature rise is being experienced earliest and most intensely in the Arctic region. The changes are worrying but the commercial interests are equally enticing. The Arctic is witnessing the convergence of the geophysical, the geo-economic and the geostrategic in strange and dramatic ways, making it a paradox and an antithesis. For India, the Arctic is distant when it comes to economic interests and near when it comes to climate change.

• Uttam Kumar Sinha, Arvind Gupta |
• November 2014 |
• Strategic Analysis

With water concerns growing increasingly urgent, the global community will benefit from a treatment of the lessons learned and best practices in water dispute resolutions and approaches to water management. This report discusses the outcome of a working group of water experts from the Near East and South Asia (NESA) region,1 set up by the Strategic Studies Network, National Defense University, Washington DC.

• Uttam Kumar Sinha |
• September 2014 |
• Strategic Analysis

The Arctic ice is melting faster than predicted. In August 2012, calculations based on the satellite imagery indicated that the summer sea ice loss was 50 per cent higher than earlier estimates. 1 Scientific evidence now suggests that the Arctic, by the middle of the century, will be ice free in the summer. Scientists call it the ‘Arctic amplification’—the reduction in the ice cover not only reduces the reflection of the sunlight but also increases the absorption of heat as the darker water is exposed.

• Uttam Kumar Sinha |
• January 2013 |
• Strategic Analysis

The Indus Water Treaty (IWT) is the most significant confidence-building measure between India and Pakistan. Despite the wars and hostilities, the IWT has functioned well since it was signed in 1960. However, one cannot ignore the challenges of future supplies of fresh water between the two countries. The article delves into a historical account of how the treaty came about, the salient features of the treaty and examines whether ‘water rationality’ will continue to govern the riparian relationship or whether ‘water sharing’ will open up a new front of contentious politics.

• Uttam Kumar Sinha, Arvind Gupta, Ashok K. Behuria |
• September 2012 |
• Strategic Analysis

China is a thirsty country desperately in need of water—a lot of it. In order to meet its water and energy requirements in the densely populated and fertile northern plains, it is successively making interventions in the Tibetan rivers in the southern part through dams and diversions. While China is well within its riparian rights to do so, a set of externalities involving the principles of water-sharing and lower riparian needs—stretching from Afghanistan to Vietnam—raise concerns.

• Uttam Kumar Sinha |
• January 2012 |
• Strategic Analysis

With the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expiring in 2012, time seems to be running out for a new successor agreement. The Protocol remains the most comprehensive attempt to negotiate binding limits on anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The long-term challenge, defined by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is to stabilise GHG concentration in the atmosphere at levels that would prevent interference with the climate system. There are, however, economic and social realities that drive anthropogenic GHG emissions.

• Uttam Kumar Sinha |
• November 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

Rivers are more than what Samuel T. Coleridge poetically expressed in Kubla Khan: ‘meandering with mazy motion’ and falling into the ‘sunless sea’. Rivers are life-givers, carrying a mystic and sacred quality about them. That they are oft described as being ‘mighty’—the mighty Amazon; the mighty Nile; the mighty Brahamaputra; the mighty Murray; the mighty Mississippi and Missouri—is hardly mystifying. Civilizations have grown around it and flourished. In contemporary politics the salience of rivers cannot be overlooked both in terms of being drivers of cooperation and conflict.

• Uttam Kumar Sinha |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

Like in the 1950s, the word ‘riparian’ is back again in the India–Pakistan lexicon, becoming this time intensely political, emotional and divisive. This development is both instructive and unsettling. It is instructive to note how the current water realties of the two countries, which have changed significantly since the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) in 1960, will now determine the treaty's future. With growing populations, inadequate water management techniques and the impact of global warming, water resources are under pressure.

• Uttam Kumar Sinha |
• July 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

Climate change has acquired high priority in the United Kingdom's foreign policy. It has in recent years raised the issue of climate change at various international forums, such as G-8, the European Union and the UN Security Council. This article examines how and why climate change has become one of the core components of UK foreign policy, and in so doing analyses the interconnections between foreign policy and climate change, and interactions between domestic and international politics.

• Uttam Kumar Sinha |
• May 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis