Rethinking water treaties
THE 1996 Ganges Water Sharing Treaty (GWT) between India and Bangladesh was never designed to last forever. Its architects knew this. They gave it a 30-year term, assuming that three decades would be sufficient for the two countries to develop the trust, the data, and the institutional maturity to negotiate something better. That deadline falls in December 2026. The negotiations now underway suggest that not one of these goals has been achieved. The climate crisis has made the stakes considerably higher than anyone imagined in 1996.
For Pakistan, watching from the west, this may seem a distant bilateral dispute. The principles being contested at Farakka go to the heart of how South Asia will manage shared rivers in a warming world. They are the same principles at stake on the Indus. What Bangladesh and India negotiate will either set a precedent for climate-adaptive water diplomacy in this region or confirm that the old zero-sum logic still rules.
The climate argument: What is striking about the current impasse is that both sides are invoking climate change to support diametrically opposed positions. Bangladesh argues that the accelerating Himalayan glacial retreat and shifting monsoon patterns have made the treaty’s fixed volumetric allocations unworkable, that climate change has destroyed the earlier hydrological baseline, and that any renewal must incorporate dynamic, flow-responsive provisions that protect Bangladesh’s guaranteed minimum supply regardless of what nature delivers upstream. Indian negotiators, by contrast, argue that reduced basin-wide flows make it harder to honour existing commitments, and that the upstream storage infrastructure that Bangladesh objects to is precisely what India needs for its own climate adaptation. Both governments are citing the same physical reality to justify positions that are fundamentally irreconcilable under the current treaty framework.
This symmetry is important. It means the climate argument is being deployed strategically rather than scientifically. The underlying hydrology does not favour either side’s framing: it demands a new framework altogether.
The Ganges Water Sharing Treaty misses three traits that made the Indus Waters Treaty resilient.
Bangladesh’s case: Dhaka’s negotiating position rests on a foundation of documented non-compliance. Between 1997 and 2016, Bangladesh received less water than the treaty guaranteed on 39 of 60 dry-season occasions, a failure rate of 65 per cent across the treaty’s most critical measurement period.
The consequences are serious. The Barind Tract in Rajshahi division, Bangladesh’s most important dry-season agricultural zone, depends almost entirely on Ganges flows for irrigation, and groundwater tables there are declining rapidly. The Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove ecosystem and a critical buffer against cyclone surges, as is the case with the Indus delta, requires minimum freshwater inflows to maintain the salinity gradients that sustain its ecology. When those inflows fall below threshold, saltwater intrusion advances inland, destroying agricultural land, contaminating drinking water and triggering slow-onset displacement that receives none of the attention commanded by spectacular floods.
Bangladesh has quantified this risk with unusual precision. Without sustained adaptation investment, rice production could decline by up to 17pc by 2050. Coastal saline intrusion has already created measurable public health consequences for communities dependent on brackish water. The country spends an estimated 6pc to 7pc of GDP on climate adaptation, a fiscal commitment without parallel in the developing world, and a significant portion goes to managing the downstream consequences of upstream water decisions it had no part in making.
Obsolete thinking: The 1996 treaty was built on a simple, static architecture: fixed volumetric allocations based on flawed historical flow data, measured at a single gauge point. This design made sense in 1996. It no longer does. In a commentary published in Nature (2026), I have argued that South Asian water treaties must transition from this static model to dynamic, climate-adaptive frameworks incorporating three foundational reforms. First, real-time hydrological monitoring linked to allocation triggers: rather than fixed volumes, both countries should receive shares of actual available flow, with minimum ecological flow guarantees built into the formula. Second, climate scenario modelling embedded in the treaty architecture itself: the agreement should specify how allocations adjust under projected flow regimes at five-year intervals, using jointly validated models rather than ad hoc renegotiation. Third, a joint technical commission with standing authority to interpret hydrometric data and recommend adaptive adjustments before disagreements escalate to political levels. These are not radical proposals. They reflect what some best-designed transboundary water agreements of the past two decades already do.
Lessons from the Indus Waters Treaty: Pakistan knows better than any country in the region what it means when a functioning water treaty is stripped of its institutional architecture. The IWT’s resilience historically rested on three features the 1996 GWT has lacked: a neutral mediator with ongoing facilitation authority, a standing technical commission empowered to resolve disputes before they reach political levels, and a shared investment mechanism that gave all parties a financial stake in the treaty’s success. The GWT has none of these. A revived and strengthened Joint Rivers Commission with clear mandate, shared data access, and binding dispute resolution would do more for Bangladesh’s water security than any marginal improvement in volumetric allocation. And without a regional financing mechanism that gives upper riparian Nepal an economic stake in basin-wide cooperation, no upstream storage solution will materialise.
India’s April 2025 suspension does not discredit the IWT design. It confirms it. The treaty held for 65 years precisely because of those safeguards, and their removal was an act of geopolitical ambition, not a design flaw. The lesson for the GWT is direct: build the institutions while political will is present, because it is always the most perishable resource in South Asian diplomacy.
The December 2026 deadline is both a constraint and an opportunity. It is the most concrete forcing mechanism for substantive water governance reform that this region has seen in a generation. Squandering it on a minimalist renewal that simply extends the existing framework with static allocations without adaptive mechanism, strengthened commission, or financing architecture would be a historic failure of imagination. The rivers are changing. The treaties must change with them. South Asia’s water future will not be secured by better arguments about the past. It will be secured by better institutions for the future.
The writer is a climate change and sustainable development expert.
Published in Dawn, March 12th, 2026