Every year, Pakistan’s flood management system begins preparing for the monsoon season months in advance. That preparation is based on hydrological data from its upstream point in India, which includes flow readings on the Chenab, Jhelum, and Indus rivers. It is used to determine the timing of the planting. It is used by irrigation departments to measure water levels in reservoirs. Relief capacity is deployed according to the projected peak flows derived from it by disaster management authorities. Since April 2025, that data has not arrived. India placed the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance and stopped sharing it. The monsoon has not waited for a diplomatic resolution.
Pakistan’s Commissioner for Indus Waters stated at the IWT seminar in Islamabad that he had written to his Indian counterpart four times since last April regarding significant fluctuations in the Chenab River’s flow but had received no response. The fourth letter was written on the night before the seminar. He described the fluctuation as “not a technical inconvenience, but rather a strategic hazard,” and said data-sharing is “the line between natural risk and manufactured disaster.”
The data silence is not occurring in a period of stable, predictable river flows. Chenab flows at Marala Headworks, the first control structure where the river enters Pakistan, swung from 78,276 cusecs to 1,527 in May 2025 with no rainfall to explain the drop. They fell further to 870 cusecs in December. Marala experienced a decline of 21,887 to 5,689 cusecs in one event window in May 2026. These are not seasonal variations within normal parameters. They are documented anomalies that Pakistan’s flood management system would ordinarily flag for investigation and that upstream data from India would ordinarily explain. Without that data, Pakistan’s authorities are reading the consequences of upstream decisions without access to the decisions themselves.
An analysis noted that the clearest near-term signal of whether the IWT abeyance is a diplomatic freeze or something harder will not come from statements but from conduct during the monsoon season, and that a monsoon that passes with continued silence on data sharing, following heightened glacial lake outburst flood alerts, would mark a meaningful deterioration regardless of what either government says publicly. That evaluation was conducted before the peak monsoon season. Pakistan is now inside it.
What India Is Building While the Data Goes Silent
The lack of data is not an isolated phenomenon in the context of India’s western rivers infrastructure action. Since May 2025, India has been advancing infrastructure projects on the western rivers, including expediting projects for the Chenab-Beas Link Tunnel and the expansion of the Ranbir Canal, and has resorted to rhetoric indicating that “not a single drop of water will flow to Pakistan. Even as ceasefires held into 2026, India advanced hydropower projects on the Chenab and carried out sediment flushing operations that increased downstream uncertainty. When all these actions happen simultaneously, the infrastructure, sediment flushing and data silence lead to a situation where Pakistan is increasingly subjected to upstream control without any transparency on the exercise of such control as per the treaties.
Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar described 17 Indian projects on Indus waterways as “tools for hydro-hegemony.” Pakistan’s Indus Commissioner stated the core issue is not hydropower but “accumulated upstream control without the treaty discipline,” adding that Pakistan did not object to lawful hydropower but to “unlawful control, excessive discretion and opaque operations.” That distinction is legally precise and practically important. A dam built within treaty limits is a valid infrastructure for development. A dam operated without treaty-required data sharing, during a period of active abeyance, while its operator claims the right to divert the downstream river entirely, is a different category of action.
During the seminar, Pakistan’s Indus Commissioner stated that the country has received two awards from the Court of Arbitration in 2025 and May 2026, in which four key points have been confirmed: India’s non-appearance does not paralyze the process; the abeyance posture does not give the court incompetence; the award is final, binding and controlling; and treaty restrictions on India’s water-control power are substantive and enforceable. India has rejected both awards and maintains the court is illegally constituted. However, India’s rejection of a binding arbitral award, under a treaty it has signed, is, whatever the reason for the decision, a violation of international law.
In its Final Award dated August 2025, the Permanent Court of Arbitration described India’s actions as “water weaponization” and reaffirmed that the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty by India was not permissible and it must allow Pakistan to use the western rivers without hindrance. That direction has not been complied with. The four letters that have not been answered indicate that the data-sharing duty has not been fulfilled specifically. The monsoon season is just an example of the human toll of such non-compliance.
Pakistan’s legal case is the strongest it has been since 1960. The arbitral awards are in place. The documented flow anomalies exist. The four unanswered letters exist. The monsoon is active. The question is whether Pakistan can use this mix of legal force and operational necessity to push implementation of the award at every opportunity in international fora or whether the legal clock runs while the flood risk increases and it waits till the end of another season to take further action. Waiting has a cost, measured in cusecs, not just courtrooms.
