CHENAB VALLEY, Jammu and Kashmir—Shama Begum, sporting a standard shalwar kameez and a pink scarf draped over her head, sits in her kitchen in Dungduro village, her again pressed in opposition to a cracked wall. Now in her late 40s, she grew up in Sewarbatti, not removed from Kishtwar district, a few 155-mile journey by automobile from town of Jammu.
Her complete life has revolved across the Chenab River. Her household sorted the springs that fed their fields, herded cattle alongside the riverbanks, and fished the smaller streams, simply as their mother and father and grandparents did. “I spent summers out within the fields, rising beans, rice, maize, fruit,” Shama stated. “We used to relaxation underneath the timber. However now, we’ve misplaced our land and cattle.”
CHENAB VALLEY, Jammu and Kashmir—Shama Begum, sporting a standard shalwar kameez and a pink scarf draped over her head, sits in her kitchen in Dungduro village, her again pressed in opposition to a cracked wall. Now in her late 40s, she grew up in Sewarbatti, not removed from Kishtwar district, a few 155-mile journey by automobile from town of Jammu.
Her complete life has revolved across the Chenab River. Her household sorted the springs that fed their fields, herded cattle alongside the riverbanks, and fished the smaller streams, simply as their mother and father and grandparents did. “I spent summers out within the fields, rising beans, rice, maize, fruit,” Shama stated. “We used to relaxation underneath the timber. However now, we’ve misplaced our land and cattle.”
Kishtwar and neighboring Doda district are filled with thick forests and steep valleys. The area is gorgeous. However the purpose it’s now the article of wider consideration is its hydropower potential. India is within the midst of planning to construct seven hydropower tasks right here; 4 are already underway. These are massive tasks, meant to pump out 5,190 megawatts of electrical energy. However they’re additionally turning the lives of greater than 20,000 individuals the other way up, particularly Indigenous households who depend on the forests and their farms simply to get by.
In Doda’s Chenab basin, persons are conserving monitor of how a lot the springs have shrunk. Neighborhood logs present spring flows are down by 30 p.c. The massive dams upstream, similar to Pakal Dul, have messed with the river’s pure peaks, making it even tougher for farmers to irrigate their fields. This hydropower enlargement marks the hardening of water politics right into a safety doctrine. Infrastructure now doubles as deterrence, remodeling shared rivers into geopolitical instruments.
What’s unfolding alongside the Chenab isn’t just an power enlargement however a shift in how water is ruled. As India-Pakistan relations worsen, water as soon as handled as a shared useful resource underneath the Indus Waters Treaty is more and more framed in New Delhi as an asset to be “totally utilized,” even because the nation stays formally treaty-compliant. Hydropower enlargement in Jammu and Kashmir now serves a twin function: advancing home power targets whereas signaling resolve towards Pakistan in a basin lengthy outlined by rivalry and distrust.
Villages are gone, households compelled out, and lots of people have misplaced their land. Researchers and locals maintain sounding the alarm: These dams, most of them run-of-the-river, deliver large environmental and human prices. Although run-of-the-river tasks typically get bought as “low affect,” consultants level out that, in mountain areas, the harm actually provides up, with massive stretches of forest misplaced, good farmland drowned, and delicate ecosystems on the road.
“Whereas these tasks are known as ‘run of the river,’ supposedly with small storage, they entail giant dams and tunnels, and a few, like Baglihar and the proposed Sawalkot challenge, do have storage that may have an effect on downstream flows,” stated Parineeta Dandekar, a river researcher and affiliate coordinator on the South Asia Community on Dams, Rivers, and Individuals. “Not one of the tasks cleared to date violate the Indus Waters Treaty, however their environmental impacts in Jammu and Kashmir have been profound, on protected areas, forests, groundwater springs, river ecology, and downstream stability, notably in a climate-stressed and politically delicate basin just like the Chenab.”
Whereas legally compliant, the focus of those tasks in Kashmir permits India to maximise upstream operational management in ways in which undermine Pakistan, blurring the road between infrastructure planning and strategic signaling to an adversary. These pressures are unfolding in a area already marked by political instability and deep distrust over shared water assets.
In Kashmir, the shifts are particularly consequential. As a closely securitized and politically contested area, giant infrastructure tasks face weaker necessities for consent, transparency, and environmental safeguards, turning river governance into an extension of safety administration reasonably than a participatory growth course of.
“Local weather change is popping river basins just like the Chenab into zones of compound danger the place water shortage, political distrust, and historic battle reinforce each other,” stated Erin Sikorsky, the director of the Middle for Local weather and Safety. “As glaciers soften sooner and droughts intensify, upstream and downstream communities are more and more suspicious of one another, even when nobody is intentionally withholding water.”
Sewarbatti was fully displaced, forcing Shama, her husband, and their three youngsters to relocate to the close by village of Dungduro. The compensation her household acquired was inadequate to maneuver to a city. “The cash was not even sufficient to purchase a plot, not to mention construct a correct home,” Shama stated. “We constructed this small home right here, however now heavy blasting from the dam building has induced cracks within the partitions. It’s not secure to stay in.” Pointing to the fissures spreading throughout her dwelling, she requested, “We misplaced our land, our means to outlive. If this doesn’t make us helpless and poor, then what does?”
The Chenab River, which originates at Baralacha Cross in Himachal Pradesh, flows for greater than 300 miles by the districts of Kishtwar, Doda, Ramban, Reasi, and Akhnoor earlier than getting into Pakistan.
Local weather change is intensifying dangers throughout your entire Himalayan river system. These native environmental disruptions are unfolding in opposition to a backdrop of escalating geopolitical stress between India and Pakistan, the place shared rivers have lengthy been entangled with questions of sovereignty, safety, and energy.
“With the onset of local weather change, it has turn into extra mandatory than ever for international locations sharing a basin, such because the Chenab, to cooperate, share data, and respect transboundary agreements,” stated Josh Klemm, the manager director of Worldwide Rivers, a U.S.-based nonprofit. “Run-of-river tasks, regardless of their supposedly restricted environmental affect, are proving to be notably detrimental to river ecology within the area, triggering landslides, cracks to houses, and disruptions to freshwater programs in a geologically energetic Himalayan panorama.”
Greater than two dozen hydropower tasks have been deliberate alongside the Chenab and its tributaries in Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir alone. The Chenab Valley can be a seismically energetic area with a historical past of earthquakes, elevating considerations concerning the security of enormous infrastructure tasks.
India and Pakistan share the waters of the Indus River system underneath the Indus Waters Treaty, a decades-old settlement typically cited as a uncommon instance of cooperation between the 2 rivals. However the treaty has come underneath growing pressure in recent times.
In 2025, India threatened to halt water flows to Pakistan after declaring the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance following a lethal militant assault in Kashmir, prompting Pakistan to warn that any diversion of water could be handled as an act of struggle. The episode underscored how rapidly water disputes within the area can escalate into safety crises. On this mannequin, local weather stress dangers narrowing diplomatic off-ramps between two nuclear-armed states, the place water disputes escalate from technicalities to existential threats amid fragile pacts such because the 1988 non-attack settlement.
The Indus Waters Treaty has more and more shifted from being a confidence-building mechanism to a instrument for strategic signaling. Since 2016, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authorities has repeatedly invoked the language of revisiting, limiting, or canceling the treaty after safety crises, altering how the settlement capabilities in public and diplomatic life. After the Could 2025 skirmish, New Delhi’s choice to maintain the treaty in abeyance signaled that cooperation itself had turn into conditional and reversible.
This renders India-Pakistan water competitors not only a diplomatic concern however a home governance and safety downside, particularly in securitized Kashmir, the place dams bypass native consent and eschew transparency. “The Indus Waters Treaty operates in a relationship outlined by deep distrust, the place technical legality hardly ever settles political fears,” stated Ashok Swain, a professor of peace and battle analysis at Uppsala College. “Even when India argues that its tasks are treaty-compliant, Pakistan typically perceives dams and hydropower amenities in Kashmir as creating management over timing and move that might be exploited throughout crises. This notion has sharpened since 2016, when the Modi authorities repeatedly hinted at utilizing water as leverage, turning routine engineering selections into symbols of coercion.”
A couple of homes away from Shama lives Naseema Bano along with her husband, in-laws, and three daughters. After I visited, Naseema stood on a parapet overlooking her small kitchen backyard. After relocating to Dungduro, Naseema made certain to develop greens to remain occupied and complement her household’s meals. However she didn’t anticipate the toll the brand new surroundings and the close by building would tackle her well being. “My well being has step by step deteriorated,” Naseema stated. “I endure from frequent fevers, coughs, and chills due to the air pollution. I hardly ever go exterior now and stay confined indoors.”
When the dams had been first proposed, villagers had been promised growth, employment, higher roads, and improved amenities. Residents say these guarantees vanished as soon as their land was acquired. There is no such thing as a hospital, college, or pharmacy within the space. “My husband works as a daily-wage laborer on the dam building web site and earns about $340 a month,” Naseema stated. “It’s hardly sufficient. We’re slowly dropping the battle for survival.”
For households displaced by hydropower enlargement, the results of local weather stress and political battle are already being lived, crack by crack, sickness by sickness, in houses that had been by no means meant to interchange the land they misplaced. As local weather change accelerates and political belief erodes, the prices of treating rivers as strategic belongings reasonably than shared lifelines are more and more borne by these with the least energy to form selections made upstream.
