Four letters have gone from Pakistan's Commissioner for Indus Waters to his Indian counterpart since April 2025 concerning fluctuations in the Chenab, a river that reaches Pakistan through Indian-administered territory. None, he says, has been answered. Syed Muhammad Mehar Ali Shah has called the fluctuations a “strategic hazard”: Pakistan is trying to forecast a river whose upstream reaches lie outside its control, without the operational data the 1960 treaty entitles it to request from India, including at daily or other requested intervals where necessary for operational purposes.
The stakes are rising as the mountains feeding those rivers change. The Indus reaches Pakistan after flowing through Ladakh; the Jhelum also crosses from Indian-administered Kashmir. About %40 of Indus flow comes from snowmelt, according to ICIMOD, the Kathmandu-based mountain research center. Its reports in March found that glacier loss across the Hindu Kush Himalaya has doubled since 2000, with monitored glaciers thinning by as much as 27 meters since 1975.
Meltwater is not the only thing those mountains send down. As glaciers retreat, they leave unstable lakes that can burst and release millions of cubic meters of water and debris in a single surge. Pakistan's GLOF-II programme was designed against a 2013 Pakistan Meteorological Department inventory of 3,044 glacial lakes in Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 33 of them identified as potentially hazardous, and an estimated 7.1 million people living in the most vulnerable districts. Those are project-baseline figures, not a current national risk assessment; nor does the installation or monitoring of equipment by itself establish complete operational warning coverage, which also depends on commissioning, calibration, integration and maintenance. The hazard does not stop at the border. India runs its own glacial-lake risk assessment across the Himalaya, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, and neither country's early-warning coverage extends to the others slopes.
