‘Water terrorism’: New Delhi accuses Pakistan of wasting TWICE what India gets under river sharing treaty

India has dismissed Pakistani media reports that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government seeks to breach a decades-old water sharing treaty between the two countries, accusing Islamabad of covering up its own immense waste.

Prompted by press reports claiming India had drafted proposals to construct dams in the disputed Kashmir region in alleged violation of the Indus Waters Agreement, PK Saxena, New Delhi’s Indus Waters commissioner, said the allegations were no more than an attempt by Pakistan to deflect from its own “gross mismanagement of water resources.”

“The reports of India’s attempt of breach of Indus Waters Treaty has been rejected as false and far from reality,” Saxena told PTI, noting that Islamabad wastes roughly twice the amount of water allocated to India under the accord, which he said was “extremely generous” to Pakistan.

These acts of objecting and putting obstacles in order to prevent India to fully utilise its rights under the Treaty are Pakistan’s new ‘water terrorism’ to impede the development of [Jammu and Kashmir] and certainly do not conform to the spirit of the treaty.

India and Pakistan share the waters of six rivers that flow through both nations under the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, which has remained unbroken even through three wars.

Under the agreement, India is granted only around 16 percent of the total water resources, and is not even utilizing all of it, allowing the rest to flow downstream to Pakistani territory. But despite having access to a majority of the resource, Pakistan, according to Saxena, was recklessly misusing up to two-thirds of its own portion.

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