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LettersReforms are a band-aid solution to water woes of downstream countries
Readers discuss the necessity of enforceable laws for rivers, Hong Kong’s pivot to Central Asia, and Chinese tourists’ safety fears
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Ambika Vishwanath rightly highlights that South Asian governments often blame upstream neighbours for water woes, instead of undertaking domestic reforms (“South Asia must make water a top priority”, May 13).
But in today’s South Asia, a structural gap is the whole story: no amount of internal efficiency can protect a downstream country when someone else controls the tap. Any debate collapses unless it confronts that asymmetry.
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Consider the Indus. For 65 years the Indus Waters Treaty survived wars and nuclear stand-offs. After an attack in Kashmir in April 2025, India suspended the treaty with Pakistan “with immediate effect”, halting data-sharing as well as meetings between Indus commissioners.
Pakistan could repair every canal and modernise every pump station; none of that would restore the certainty of flows that farmers need to plant, or the data managers need to manage floods. For an agrarian economy, missing flow data has implications that ripple through harvests and livelihoods.
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The strategic damage is the uncertainty deliberately created, not merely the water withheld.
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