Pakistan’s latest water alarm has arrived, once again, from across the border. On May 20, India’s state-owned NHPC invited bids for the Chenab–Beas Link Tunnel Project at Koksar in Himachal Pradesh, involving a barrage, river-diversion works and a water-diversion tunnel. The official notice places the estimated tender value at INR23.52 billion. The tender’s status then became unclear: a South Asian water-policy watchdog reported that the notice was cancelled three days later amid questions over environmental, forest and tribal clearances, yet NHPC currently lists the tender as active. Subsequent reporting describes an 8.7-kilometre tunnel and says the project was approved in May.
Islamabad estimates that the scheme could transfer 1.9 million acre-feet annually from the Chenab system into the Beas — an estimate made without formal notification or consultation from India. In June, Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar sent a letter to the president of the UN Security Council, drawing attention to two proposed projects linked to the Chenab. This was an appeal for the Council’s attention, not a case the Council has taken up for adjudication.
The confrontation cannot be separated from India’s April 2025 decision to place the Indus Waters Treaty in “abeyance”. The Indus, Jhelum and Chenab are not abstractions. They sustain Pakistan’s agriculture, food security, hydropower and rural employment. Pakistan is right to defend its treaty entitlements through law, scientific evidence, diplomacy and peaceful international mechanisms.
But the crisis exposes an uncomfortable question: how can a country demand protection for every drop entering at its border while allowing water to be polluted, poorly managed or pumped unsustainably after it arrives?
Pakistan’s first census in 1951 counted 33.7 million people in West Pakistan, the territory broadly corresponding to present-day Pakistan; the 2023 census counted 241.49 million. In seven decades, broadly the same rivers and aquifers have been required to support more than seven times as many people. The National Water Policy records a decline in per-capita surface-water availability from about 5,260 cubic metres in 1951 to around 1,000 in 2016, and projected 860 cubic metres by 2025. That long-term decline would have occurred with or without India’s dams.
Groundwater tells a parallel story. It supplies about 70 per cent of domestic water nationally, 90pc in rural areas and more than half of agricultural water, yet remains poorly measured and weakly governed. In parts of Punjab and Balochistan, and in rapidly expanding cities, aquifers are being depleted faster than they are replenished. Housing societies pave over recharge zones and drill deeper wells, while much of what is pumped remains unregistered or unmetered.
A separate international framework offers useful guidance. The UN International Law Commission’s draft articles on transboundary aquifers concern groundwater, not surface rivers such as the Chenab, and they have not become a universal binding convention. Yet their principles are relevant: equitable and reasonable use, protection of recharge zones, pollution control, cooperation and continuous monitoring. Pakistan should apply the same ethic of responsible stewardship to the aquifers it manages at home. Water belongs to the present generation, but not to it alone.
South Asia understood this long before the modern language of sustainability. The stepwells, johads, tanks and check dams of the subcontinent were not primitive technology; they embodied a practical understanding that rain must be slowed, stored and shared. Modern Pakistan has largely paved over that inheritance. Singapore, by contrast, uses two-thirds of its land as water catchment, routing rain through about 8,000 kilometres of drains, canals and rivers into 17 reservoirs. California’s Flood-MAR programme deliberately directs suitable floodwater onto farmland, floodplains and other working landscapes to replenish aquifers and reduce flood risk.
Pakistan’s own PCRWR has shown that the same logic can work here: 80 recharge sites in Islamabad returned an estimated 42 million gallons to the aquifer between June 2022 and June 2023.
The most persuasive Pakistani example, however, has come not from a ministry but from a former schoolteacher from Azad Kashmir. Usman Abbasi — known on social media as Teacher Usman — began with tree planting before turning to dry boreholes, disappearing springs and rainwater harvesting. According to his campaign’s own March 2026 tally, it had completed more than 1,140 ponds, mini-dams and dry-bore revival projects. That figure should be independently audited, but the scale of public mobilization is remarkable.
At the Institute of Islamic Sciences in Islamabad, which had reportedly been spending Rs30,000 a day on water tankers, a recharge system costing about Rs180,000 revived two dry boreholes and produced estimated monthly savings of roughly Rs900,000, according to the Arab News. These results deserve independent verification through flow meters, observation wells and water-quality testing. Yet Teacher Usman has done what official awareness campaigns rarely achieve: he has made a national crisis visible, practical and replicable.
He should not be left to carry this responsibility alone. His sites should be geotagged and studied by PCRWR, universities and provincial water authorities. Successful designs should be standardized and scaled; unsafe ones should be corrected. An individual can demonstrate a solution. Only functioning institutions can restore an aquifer.
That system must operate at every level. Cities need catchment-based drainage, storage and recharge plans: underground detention tanks beneath parks and parking areas, restored wetlands at urban edges and strict separation of sewage from stormwater. New housing developments should be required to retain, reuse or safely recharge a defined share of the rain falling within their boundaries rather than paving the land and transferring flood risk to poorer neighbourhoods.
Provinces should register and meter high-capacity wells, protect recharge zones and classify aquifers according to depletion and contamination risk. New drilling should be restricted where water tables are falling critically. The federal government, working through the Council of Common Interests, should establish a funded and time-bound National Groundwater Recovery and Monsoon Water Conservation Mission, publishing annual accounts of extraction, recharge and water-level change.
Not every drop reaching the sea is wasted: downstream flows sustain the Indus Delta, fisheries, wetlands and resistance to seawater intrusion. Nor is every recharge pit automatically beneficial. Sewage, industrial effluent and oil-contaminated runoff must never be injected into drinking-water aquifers. Recharge requires site assessment, filtration, maintenance and monitoring.
Pakistan must continue defending its Chenab rights through treaty mechanisms, data and diplomacy. Bringing its concerns to the attention of the Security Council president was one step, not a substitute for the treaty’s technical and legal processes. Sovereignty over a river does not end at the border. It also means not squandering at home the resource we ask the world to help protect.
Teacher Usman has shown what one citizen can do without waiting for perfect institutions. The state must now show that it can learn from him — before another monsoon floods our cities while our wells continue to run dry.
The writer is a freelance journalist and Communications Specialist at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), Islamabad. Views expressed are his own. He can be reached at mqaisar@pide.org.pk