India is building a chain of dams on the Chenab that will change how and when water reaches Pakistan. An international court has ruled against it. India has not shown up. We have not woken up.

Faisal, a rice farmer in Hafizabad, does not know that a courtroom in The Hague matters to him. The farmers in Faisalabad, whose wheat crop depends on water arriving at the right time in February, do not follow the proceedings of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Nor do those in Multan, whose families have farmed the same land for generations, watered by the Chenab. But what happens in that courtroom, and what India is doing while ignoring it, will determine whether their crops get water at all.

The Chenab is being changed. Not stolen overnight, not diverted in a single dramatic act that would prompt outrage and response. Changed slowly, structurally, one dam at a time, in a manner that shifts control over when water flows, not just how much. Farmers do not measure annual allocation figures. Their concern is whether water arrives during the sowing window.

India is building a staircase of dams on the Chenab before the river crosses into Pakistan. Three are already operating. Four more are under active construction. The Sawalkote Hydropower Project, the largest yet approved — bigger than anything India has built on this river before  received its environmental clearance in October 2025. When complete, these structures will sit one behind the other along the length of the Chenab in Indian Kashmir, each capable of holding back water, releasing it in bursts, or timing its flow to match India’s electricity demand rather than our irrigation needs.

Each dam, India argues, is perfectly legal under the sixty-five-year-old Indus Waters Treaty that governs how the two countries share the Indus river system. And on paper, project by project, that argument has some basis. The treaty does allow India to build run-of-river hydropower on the Chenab. But the question is whether a chain of such projects, positioned one after another, gives India something the treaty never intended: the ability to act as the timekeeper of our river. The treaty allocates volume. Agriculture depends on timing.

In August 2025, the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in Pakistan’s favour on the core legal questions, specifically on how the design rules governing these dams must be interpreted to prevent India from gaining operational control over flow timing. It was a significant ruling, issued by a tribunal empanelled under the treaty’s own dispute-resolution mechanism, binding on both parties under international law. An international court can rule. It cannot stop the pouring of concrete.

India had refused to participate — it was not in the room. Since the ruling, not a single project has paused.

In May 2025, Reuters obtained and reviewed an internal Indian government document — a power ministry directive instructing authorities to fast-track four projects simultaneously as a co-ordinated package. Four dams — Pakal Dul, Kiru, Kwar and Ratle. Individually treaty-compliant. Collectively cumulative.

At the existing Salal dam, something more immediate is already underway. Engineers have reopened flushing gates. Dredging is now restoring storage capacity that had silted up over decades. In the short term, flushing releases are sending muddy water downstream towards Marala, risking disruption to the canal system. In the longer term, restored storage gives India the ability to regulate seasonal flows in ways the treaty had explicitly prevented. Meanwhile, India’s state-owned NHPC has floated a civil works tender worth INR 5,129 crore for the 1,856 MW Sawalkote project, which will become the largest dam on the Chenab and a key step, according to India’s Financial Express, in accelerating one of its largest under-development hydropower assets. The suspension of the treaty has not just changed a legal status. It has opened sealed gates — literally.

The Chenab carries enough water for Pakistan’s needs. Even with the dams India is building, the volume of water allocated to Pakistan under the treaty is not, at least for now, being permanently taken. What changes is the timing, the predictability, the reliability of flows arriving when farmers need them. As the river enters Pakistan at Marala Headworks, it becomes the lifeline of central Punjab, sustaining Sialkot, Hafizabad, Faisalabad, Jhang, Toba Tek Singh, Khanewal and Multan — the districts that form the backbone of Pakistan’s agricultural basket of wheat, rice, cotton and sugarcane. If water is held briefly upstream to align with power demand and released later, annual allocations may remain intact on paper. But a week’s disruption during critical sowing periods can devastate hundreds of thousands of acres.

When India’s dams introduce variability into Chenab flows, they are introducing that variability into a system that was already haemorrhaging. The vulnerability is real. But it is not only India’s creation. Our canals lose water at embarrassing rates; roughly half of what they carry never reaches a farmer’s field. This is not a new discovery. It is documented by WAPDA’s own research going back decades and confirmed by a World Bank assessment that found overall system efficiency as low as 35 per cent. Our measurement systems are so unreliable that IRSA’s own data shows roughly one-sixth of total annual system inflows unaccounted for each year. We do not know where it goes. When a more finely regulated upstream flow meets a fragile downstream distribution network, modest timing shifts become amplified stress. The emerging risk is not the visible seizure of water. It is operational asymmetry — enhanced upstream flexibility interacting with downstream inefficiency.

What do Faisal and other Chenab irrigators actually need? They need water to arrive when the crop needs it, in the volume the crop needs, with enough notice that they can plan. They do not need perfect geopolitics. They need functional canals, reliable headworks, an efficient irrigation department and a government that treats the water sector as a national priority.

Pakistan must pursue every available legal avenue — the court proceedings, the diplomatic channels, the international engagement — to hold India to its treaty obligations. That is not optional. The August 2025 ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration is a legal foundation that must be built upon, not left to gather dust while India builds dams.

But legal argument without domestic reform is a house built on sand. If we win every argument at The Hague and lose the water anyway because our own infrastructure cannot capture, measure and distribute what arrives — then we have won a principle and lost a river.

The Chenab does not understand politics. It flows downhill. It does not know which court has ruled or which government has ignored that ruling. It only knows gradient and gravity. Whether it reaches the fields of central Punjab in the right volume at the right time will be determined partly by what India builds in Kashmir and partly by what we choose to fix, or refuse to fix, on our own side of the border.

Faisal and the Chenab irrigators are not waiting for a court ruling or a diplomatic communiqué. They are waiting for water to arrive when their crop needs it. The river is not being taken overnight. It is being recalibrated. The question is whether our response will be.