Top water management experts and irrigation engineers from Pakistan and India agreed on certain critical points regarding water issues

Misperceptions rather than facts dominate the debate on water between Pakistan and India. Pakistan’s green belt draws its sustenance from rivers that flow out of Jammu and Kashmir. More than 60 years after these waters have been peacefully shared, there are accusations from sections of Pakistan that India could choke this supply line by building a series of dams – or, according to more recent allegations in the wake of devastating floods in Pakistan, release more water, worsening the floods.

Sitting across the table for two days, top water management experts and irrigation engineers from both countries discussed the issue, often with sufficient rancour, if only to understand each other’s positions as a starting point on a journey to cool the debate that some hawkish commentators have suggested could lead to war.

At the centre of the debate was naturally the 1960 Indus Water Treaty that governs the river flows into Pakistan and provides an agreed dispute resolution mechanism. The buzz in Pakistan is that India is building more than 100 dams on the Sutlej and Chenab that would deplete supplies to farmlands that feed Pakistan’s 180 million people.

While some Pakistani experts stuck to that position, most appeared convinced that India was not violating the IWT by building these dams and what was planned were a few dozen small projects, called run-of-the-river, which wouldn’t obstruct flows but only divert them for a short stretch to run power turbines.

The meeting coincided with a new row over the 330mw Kishanganga hydroelectric project in Jammu and Kashmir. India and Pakistan, after failing to resolve it within the IWT, agreed to international arbitration with the UN secretary-general selecting an umpire.

“There is no drying up because run-of-the-river projects deplete water only at filling time of new dams. Whether there are 50 or 100 it doesn’t matter. You can’t store running water,” said B. G. Verghese, a water expert associated with the Centre for Policy Research.

Ramaswamy Iyer, a former bureaucrat, agreed that while neither India nor Pakistan were models of water management, there was no data to show that New Delhi was cheating on the Indus agreement. In fact, experts from both sides agreed that there was no data available to shape a reasonable debate guided by facts.

To this end, the conference urged that both countries jointly plough for data and make it public in order to clear the fog. Joint mechanisms to measure water flows into Pakistan, as done in the case of Bangladesh, could remove mistrust, they said.

The conference, like previous ones on strategic issues and the media, was structured around a series of closed-door sessions featuring presentations and open discussions.

Beyond water-sharing, discussions went into issues relating to environmental and ecological challenges in the Himalayan region, as well as cooperation in watershed management.

The Aman ki Asha ‘Water is Life’ conference was held in New Delhi, July 29-30, 2010, in collaboration the Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation