Even while the India-Pakistan treaty for sharing the Indus waters remains operational, the provinces of Pakistan are squabbling. Mostly, it is Sindh vs. Punjab.
Amidst the many political problems that cry out for resolution in Pakistan, perhaps the severest one is the sharing of the water of the Indus river system, which is the hydrological lifeline of Pakistan. Indeed, no conflict in Pakistan in recent times has been more obdurate, acrimonious and pervasive than this complex dispute. Competition over withdrawal rights from the Indus has added another dimension to the long-standing rivalry between Punjab and Sindh. To complicate matters the two other provinces of Pakistan, the North West Frontier Province and Balochistan, also seem ready to join the fray.
The problem is partly a historical inheritance. In 1947, a geographically contiguous area, serviced by an integrated water management regime, was geopolitically partitioned. Water use, till then regulated by a single administering authority, now came to be governed both by an international agreement between Pakistan and India on the one hand, and by federal and provincial agencies subject to internal political and interest group pressures on the other. While the international agreement has by and large withstood the rigours of the periodically hostile India-Pakistan relations, the internal arrangement in Pakistan has become increasingly volatile, as even technical issues have become politicised.
The Pakistan-India distribution of water use is, on paper at least, as well defined as the geography that dictated it. The Indus river basin, which has an area 944,574 sq km, stretches from the Himalayan mountains in the north to the dry alluvial southern plains of Sindh, from which the river gets its name. Below its source near Lake Mansarovar in the Himalayan catchment, the main branch is joined by four main upstream tributaries, the Shyok near Skardu, the Gilgit and Hunza near Bunji and the Siran just north of Tarbela. Downstream, the river system has three eastern tributaries, the Ravi, Sutlej and Beas, and three western constituents, the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab. By the Indus Water Treaty of 1960 the consumptive use of the former has been given over to India, while that of the latter has been awarded to Pakistan. Before the Indus reaches the province of Sindh, the five rivers of the Punjab (Jhelum and Chenab and the three eastern rivers, the Ravi, Sutlej and Beas) merge below the Panjnad head-works.