Water Security

India should implement its agreements with Bangladesh in a time bound manner, fast track trans-border infrastructural developmental schemes and address the interests of the common people of Bangladesh.

• Pushpita Das
• January 04, 2012
• IDSA Comments

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

India should earnestly try to accommodate and address the legitimate concerns of Bangladesh by agreeing in principle that it will not let water flows go below a mutually agreed upon level.

• Punam Pandey
• December 20, 2011
• IDSA Comments

Lower riparian countries must develop sound strategies to bring China to the negotiating table with a view to stopping it from further damming or diverting the waters of the Brahmaputra or any other river originating in Tibet and flowing into South Asia.

• Hari Bansh Jha
• August 09, 2011
• IDSA Comments

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

Though the Indus Water Treaty apportions 80 per cent of the waters of the Indus River Basin to Pakistan and only 20 per cent to India, Pakistan is engaged in baseless allegations to inflame public opinion and project India as its number one threat.

• Arvind Gupta
• March 29, 2010
• IDSA Comments

Dam building in Arunachal Pradesh should not be perceived as an insurmountable irritant, but rather as a sign of a vibrant Indian democracy.

• Medha Bisht
• February 01, 2010
• IDSA Comments

The issue of water allocation and water rights of Bangladesh, India and China could form the basis of a framework on which joint cooperation among the three countries can be formulated.

• Medha Bisht
• November 11, 2009
• IDSA Comments

Water may not become a catalyst for a direct conflict, but China could leverage Tibet’s water as a politico-military tool vis-à-vis other riparian states. As the economies of India and China grow, both are bound to treat water as a strategic commodity.

• P. Stobdan
• October 23, 2009
• IDSA Comments