New York (Web Desk): Pakistan has warned that India is triggering a serious threat to regional stability by undermining the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty IWT), with a senior diplomat raising the issue at a UN-associated forum focused on global water scarcity.
Speaking on Tuesday at a roundtable jointly hosted by the United Nations University (UNU) and the permanent Canadian Mission to the UN, Pakistan’s acting permanent representative, Ambassador Usman Jadoon, said India’s unilateral decision to keep the treaty in abeyance had placed Pakistan’s water security at unprecedented risk.
He told participants that the situation was not the result of environmental factors but a conscious action by a state to use water as leverage.
Ambassador Jadoon pointed to what he described as concrete violations following India’s move, including sudden and unnotified interruptions in water flows to downstream areas and the withholding of essential hydrological data that had long been shared under the six-decade-old agreement.
Reiterating Pakistan’s position, he stressed that the treaty remains legally binding and does not allow any one party to suspend or alter its provisions on its own.
The remarks came in the wake of the release of a major UN research report titled Global Water Bankruptcy, which warns that many river basins around the world are approaching irreversible damage and calls for a fundamental rethink of how water is governed globally.
Referring to the Indus River Basin, the Pakistani envoy said it supports one of the largest integrated irrigation systems in the world, meets more than 80 percent of Pakistan’s agricultural water requirements, and sustains the lives and livelihoods of over 240 million people.
He noted that the treaty had, for decades, provided a stable and predictable framework for managing these shared waters.
Ambassador Jadoon also outlined Pakistan’s vulnerability as a lower-riparian, semi-arid country facing multiple climate-related pressures, including floods, droughts, rapid glacier melt, declining groundwater reserves, and fast population growth.
He said these challenges are placing immense strain on already stressed water resources.
To respond, he added, Pakistan is pursuing a range of measures to strengthen water resilience, such as integrated water planning, flood protection, rehabilitation of irrigation infrastructure, groundwater recharge, and ecological restoration through initiatives like Living Indus and Recharge Pakistan.
Despite these efforts, he cautioned that water-related risks in shared river systems cannot be addressed by individual countries acting alone.
Effective management, he said, depends on cooperation, transparency, and predictability in transboundary water governance, which are critical for the survival of downstream populations.
Looking ahead to the upcoming UN Water Conference, Ambassador Jadoon said the international process must recognize water insecurity as a systemic global risk, place cooperation and respect for international water law at the core of shared water management, and ensure that commitments made by states translate into real and meaningful protection for vulnerable downstream communities.