With India's suspension of the Indus Water Treaty and domestic mismanagement eroding Pakistan's reserves, BNU Center for Policy Research (BCPR) – a Lahore-based think tank has issued a comprehensive report entitled "Pakistan's Water Crisis: The Way Forward," suggesting optimum solutions to Pakistan’s imminent water crisis.
The ‘Task Force on Diplomacy and Politics on Water’ that BCPR established in October 2025 brought together diplomats, hydrologists, legal scholars, and international academics to confront a crisis that is simultaneously technical, diplomatic, and existential. The timing of the Task Force was not incidental.
Six months earlier, on April 23, 2025, India announced to hold the IWT in abeyance on the pretext of a terrorist attack in Pahalgam in Indian Occupied Kashmir adding that the suspension would remain in place "until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abjures its support for cross-border terrorism."
For Pakistan, which depends on the Indus River system for roughly 90 per cent of its agricultural water, the move was not merely a diplomatic provocation, but a warning by India that it was was weaponizing water which is a lifeline for Pakistan’s economy and its people.
The Indus Waters Treaty, signed in 1960 with the World Bank as guarantor, divided the six rivers of the Indus Basin between the two countries: India received the three eastern rivers (the Sutlej, Ravi, and Beas) while Pakistan retained the right to unrestricted use of the three western rivers (the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab). The Treaty held even through wars, coups, and crises that would have shattered lesser agreements for the past four decades.
The April 2025 decision to hold the Treaty in abeyance was not an isolated provocation but the culmination of a two-decade strategy by accumulating upstream capacity, eroding Treaty’s mechanisms and demanding Pakistan for revision of the Treaty or replacing it with a new treaty.
The BCPR Task Force included credible experts. Its chairperson was Dr Moeed Wasim Yusuf, Vice Chancellor of BNU. Ambassador Mansoor Ahmad Khan, Director of BCPR and a former diplomat with decades of experience in South Asian affairs, served as Convener, while Dr Zainab Ahmed, Deputy Director of BCPR, functioned as its secretary.
The distinguished members included Ambassador Jalil Abbas Jillani, former caretaker Foreign Minister/Secretary of Pakistan, legal experts like Feisal Naqvi and Ali Sultan as well as a number of hydrological experts and renowned academics on water issues. The Terms of Reference provided the Task Force to identify on Pakistan’s legal and political options for restoration of the IWT and suggest meaningful reforms in Pakistan’s water sector.
The legal case: strong, but untested
The Task Force is candid about a troubling gap in Pakistan’s strategy on the Indus Water Treaty: that since April 2025, Pakistan has not mounted a coherent or aggressive international campaign on the issue. "Pakistan, despite its strong legal position, has not evolved a coherent and proactive approach," the report states, adding that the country has "not launched an aggressive narrative at the international level on the subject."
The window to do so, the panel warns, may be narrowing and thus advising the government and its institutions to take advantage of Pakistan’s rising profile with major global and regional powers particularly the United States and China for increased international pressure on India to work out a solution with the framework of the Treaty.
The domestic crisis: hidden in plain sight
The Treaty dispute, urgent as it is, occupies only half the report's attention. The other half is devoted to what the Task Force considers an equally serious, and more tractable, problem: the state of water management inside Pakistan itself. Pakistan receives, on average, approximately 134 million acre-feet of river inflows annually, nearly 95 per cent from the western rivers.
By most technical metrics, this is not an insufficient supply. The crisis, the report argues, is of governance rather than geology. Water measurement systems are outdated. Inter-provincial data-sharing is limited. The 1991 Water Apportionment Accord, the domestic treaty that divides water among Pakistan's provinces, has not been meaningfully revisited in over three decades.
Groundwater is being extracted at unsustainable rates with almost no regulatory oversight. Farming patterns persist in water-stressed regions that are incompatible with available supply. And behavioural incentives for conservation, whether for farmers, industries, or households, are nearly absent.
The report recommends a sweeping set of domestic reforms: establishing a national focal point with authority over both technical and diplomatic water affairs; modernising data collection and water measurement infrastructure; overhauling the groundwater regulatory framework; incentivizing crop shifts through pricing signals and procurement policy; and initiating a structured inter-provincial water dialogue to address long-standing distribution grievances.
A blueprint for action
The Task Force's recommendations are organised in three tiers. Institutionally, it calls for the appointment of a dedicated national focal point on water, someone who understands the technical, legal, and diplomatic dimensions simultaneously, and for a two-pronged strategy that addresses the IWT dispute and domestic reform in parallel rather than treating one as a distraction from the other.
On the Treaty, the panel recommends exploring options for engaging with India for amicable resolution of the matter. On the legal fron, it suggestes seeking the constitution of a fresh Court of Arbitration specifically to adjudicate the legality of India's suspension, a distinct proceeding from the existing arbitration which India has already contested.
It urges Pakistan to engage a team of international legal experts within the next three months, revamp the Indus Waters Commissioner's secretariat, and activate bilateral and multilateral diplomatic pressure, including at the UN Security Council, the General Assembly, and regional forums like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
The report also identifies a potentially significant diplomatic lever: China. Accounting for eight per cent of the Indus Basin and carrying considerable influence over India, Beijing's constructive engagement on water issues could, the Task Force suggests, serve as a precursor to a broader regional dialogue.
Pakistan's post-May 2025 elevation in international standing and its close relations with Washington amid the latter's own tensions with New Delhi offer additional pressure points that the report argues should be actively exploited before the strategic moment passes.
The overarching message of the report is one of urgency without despair. Pakistan's legal position is strong, its diplomatic opportunities are real, and its domestic water system, however mismanaged, retains elements of resilience. What it has lacked, the Task Force concludes, is will, coordination, and a coherent strategy. The report is, in essence, an attempt to supply all three with a candid warning that the clock is ticking.
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