The water crisis in Tehran, compelling Iranian authorities to warn about water rationing and evacuation of the country’s capital, may sound dystopian.
The reservoirs feeding the metropolis of 13 million dipped below 5% of their capacity, a point of no return after a decade of unrelenting drought, systemic mismanagement, and the accelerating impacts of climate change. Rainfall has been at a record low, and meteorological officials state bleakly that it is highly likely that no or very little rainfall is expected for the coming days.
The prospect of Tehran rendered uninhabitable by thirst serves as a terrifying preview of a future that is rapidly descending upon the entire world, inviting new types of conflicts evolving within and outside.
Just months before Tehran’s dire warning, the long-simmering tensions between Iran and Afghanistan erupted into violent clashes along their desolate border, primarily over Afghanistan's construction and operation of the Kamal Khan Dam on the Helmand River, which Iran alleges is catastrophically strangling the flow into its drought-stricken Sistan and Baluchistan province.
Hydro-Nationalism in South Asia
This conflict is a stark microcosm of a terrifying new global paradigm. And it finds its most explosive expression in South Asia, where the decades-old Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) between India and Pakistan - a landmark agreement that survived three wars - has been pushed to the brink of collapse. The fragile peace it maintained has been shattered by climate change, skyrocketing demand, and a dangerous new willingness to weaponise hydropolitics.
The recent, brutal cycle of violence triggered by the Pahalgam terror attack has dragged the South Asia Region into a terrifying water-war nexus with consequences that are, quite literally, unthinkable.
After the attack, New Delhi declared it would initiate a "complete and comprehensive review" of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), effectively suspending it indefinitely and unilaterally. Though the full parliamentary debate was starkly clear, signaling India's readiness to maximise permissible cross-border water use (citing Jhelum and Chenab) as a strategic counter to terrorism, which Pakistan rejects, the elimination of another perspective on climate change, meticulously documented by sub-regional analysts arguing that India-Pakistan confrontations have hindered Jammu and Kashmir's development in terms of water related issues, went unnoticed. Since 1948, Kashmir has been a live case in UNSC under Chapter VI of UN Charter.
The threat to unilaterally alter the hydrological status quo escalated tensions to a terrifying peak, with definite "snowball effect" repercussions on Jammu and Kashmir's river-dependent populations. The May 2025 India-Pakistan three-day warfare demonstrates how deeply India and Pakistan's water security issues are now intertwined with military doctrine, what strategists call "Hydro-Nationalism."
The Cracks in the IWT
The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, brokered by the World Bank, has long been hailed as a miracle of diplomacy. It divides the six rivers of the Indus basin: the three "Eastern Rivers" (Sutlej, Beas, Ravi) were allocated to India for "unrestricted use," while the three "Western Rivers" (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) were allocated to Pakistan, with India permitted certain non-consumptive uses, primarily run-of-the-river hydroelectric projects taken over by NHPC which are exclusively in Jammu and Kashmir. No role has been given to people of Jammu and Kashmir on either side of the Line of Control (LoC), since its commencement.
For Pakistan, the IWT is not just a treaty; it is a national lifeline. As detailed by several scholars, Pakistan's agrarian economy depends fundamentally on a gigantic and complex hydraulic infrastructure system. About 90% of its agriculture is irrigated by the Indus basin, supporting the world's largest contiguous irrigation network. The fear that India, as the upstream riparian, could control this flow is a foundational element of its national security psyche.
This "hydro-nationalism" fuels a deep-seated concern in Pakistan that India can "easily run Pakistan to 'dry and die’ either by diverting the flow of water or building huge storage dams or using up all the water through hydroelectric power schemes."
Within Jammu and Kashmir, the IWT is viewed through a different lens of grievance. The core grievance is that while both countries reap the agricultural and energy benefits of the waters, and India develops hydroelectric power, the people of Jammu and Kashmir feel sidelined and economically deprived. The region is constrained in its ability to build storage reservoirs that could provide irrigation for its shrinking agricultural land and generate much-needed power.
Jammu and Kashmir annually loses more than 60 billion Indian rupees ($1.3 billion) from its own share. The sense of deprivation is compounded by a severe internal water crisis within Kashmir due to local mismanagement and environmental decay, even as it is the source of water for millions downstream.
The data is alarming and is worsening:
Vanishing Water Bodies: More than 50% of water bodies in and around Srinagar and other parts of the valley have disappeared in the past century. The famed Wular and Dal lakes have shrunk dramatically.
Agricultural Collapse: The area under paddy cultivation, the valley's staple, has shrunk significantly over the past four decades. At the current rate, analysts warn, the valley could lose all its paddy land within a generation.
Dying Rivers: The Jhelum River's carrying capacity has plummeted, increasing the risk of both devastating floods and prolonged droughts.
A Regional Snapshot of Water Scarcity
The India-Pakistan confrontation is the most dramatic epicentre in a regional tragedy of scarcity, as the entire subcontinent is staring into a hydrological abyss.
India's Looming Crisis: The national per capita water availability has plummeted from over 5,000 cubic meters in 1951 to a level categorised as water-stressed, and is projected to hit an absolute scarcity level by 2050. India is the world's largest extractor of groundwater. Its agricultural sector is notoriously inefficient, using vastly more water to produce staples like wheat and rice than the global average, essentially serving as an unsustainable "virtual water export."
Pakistan's Existential Threat: Pakistan's situation is more acute. Its per capita water availability has crashed since independence. It has the world's lowest water storage capacity per capita, a fraction of which is held by the US or China. With a population six times larger than when the IWT was signed, the strain on a dwindling supply is unimaginable. Public health is also a major casualty, with a significant percentage of transmissible diseases related to unsafe water.
Rest of South Asia: Bangladesh has seen its water availability drop precipitously, with tens of millions at risk of arsenic poisoning from contaminated groundwater. Afghanistan, after decades of war, has seen its infrastructure decimated, leaving it with one of the lowest rates of access to improved water sources in the world. The case of Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Myanmar, Maldives is similar.
This crisis is fueled by a toxic cocktail of population growth, inefficient agriculture, rampant pollution, and climate change, which is altering the Himalayan glaciers that act as the region's "water towers."
A History Written in Water and Blood: From 2014 to 2025
The fragility of this system has been violently exposed not just by scarcity, but by devastating surplus. In September 2014, a catastrophic flood submerged large parts of the city of Srinagar and other parts of valley. The event was a traumatic revelation of systemic failure.
Tragically, the warning went unheeded. In a grim echo of the past, the late summer of 2025 brought another deluge. In August and September, unprecedented monsoon rains lashed J&K, mainly Jammu province, Indian Punjab, and large swathes of Pakistan.
Rivers swelled beyond danger marks, breaching embankments and submerging farmland and cities. The floods of 2025 were a climate-enhanced catastrophe that underscored a brutal irony: a region perpetually arguing over water rights was simultaneously being drowned by its uncontrolled fury.
The May 2025 war marked a dangerous shift from diplomatic tensions to kinetic conflict, with an 88-hour air battle featuring beyond-visual-range missiles, electronic warfare, and—most ominously— with critical threats to water infrastructure, and possible escalations in the future. This conflict signals a terrifying new normal: future wars may not start over water disputes, but water infrastructure will be a primary and catastrophic target.
The Spill-effect Beyond South Asia
The clash between Iran and Afghanistan is a chilling parallel and a direct consequence of the same regional aridification. It mirrors the India-Pakistan dynamic with terrifying precision - an upstream nation seeking to utilise its geographical advantage, while the downstream nation views this as an existential threat.
The frequent violent border clashes show how quickly such disputes can escalate from diplomatic notes to artillery shells when reservoirs run dry. And now, with Tehran facing the spectre of evacuation, the stakes have been raised to an almost unimaginable level. The Iranian case demonstrates that when a capital city's water supply fails, the very fabric of the state begins to fray, and the language of politics becomes one of sheer survival.
Looming over the entire India-Pakistan dispute is the spectre of China, the ultimate upstream riparian. Analysts sound a clear alarm about China's "dam-building frenzy" on the Tibetan plateau, the source of most of Asia's major rivers. A cascade of dams on the Brahmaputra River (the Yarlung Tsangpo) poses a significant threat to the quality and quantity of downstream flows into India and Bangladesh. The impediment of silt, essential for fertilising floodplains, may constitute a bigger long-term threat than the diminution of water itself.
Critically, as experts note, "China has refused to enter into a water-sharing arrangement with any co-riparian nation, especially India." This unilateralist stance grants Beijing unparalleled hydro-hegemony, creating a strategic pincer for India, caught between the intense water tensions with a reactive Pakistan in the west, and a far greater, unregulated threat from a hydro-hegemonic China in the east. In this grand hydrological game, the lessons from Tehran are clear. No nation, no matter how powerful, is entirely immune from the cascading effects of a collapsing water system.
Recommendations for a Sustainable Future
South Asia stands at a precipice in 2025. To avert a full-blown water war in South Asia, the Indus Waters Treaty must be recommitted to and modernised with climate-adaptive water-sharing formulas monitored by a permanent joint scientific commission, supported by data transparency through a publicly accessible digital platform to build trust.
The people of Jammu and Kashmir, on both sides of the LoC, must be granted tangible participatory roles through autonomous advisors on the Indus Commission and cross-border civil society initiatives funding joint projects on watershed management, agricultural efficiency, and the restoration of degraded water bodies. Both India and Pakistan must also address their massive inefficiencies in their water economies.
Additionally, subsidies must shift from water-intensive crops like rice and sugarcane to climate-resilient alternatives, and goals of “more crop per drop” must be realised through drip and sprinkler irrigation.
Stringent laws must also be enforced against industrial and agricultural pollution of rivers and groundwater.
Finally, immediate de-escalation of India-Pakistan tensions is essential, through diplomacy and back-channel dialogue initiatives. The scope of dialogue can be further extended for exploring a broader Himalayan River Basin Commission that includes China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Srilanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, and Maldives.
The waters flowing from the Himalayas have nourished civilizations for millennia. All efforts must be made to alter the current trajectory, which risks catastrophic conflict on the scale of Tehran or the Iran-Afghan border, but affecting hundreds of millions.
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