Indus Waters Treaty suspension revives hopes for completion of stalled J&K lake project
The suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) has revived hopes for the completion of a stalled project to rejuvenate the Jhelum-fed Wular lake — one of India's largest freshwater lakes — in Jammu and Kashmir's Bandipora district.
This project, about 2.5 km upstream of the similarly-stalled Tulbul Navigation Lock Project (also known as the Wular Barrage Storage project), was started by the then state government's Irrigation and Flood Control Department in 2013 at an estimated cost of Rs 30 crore. Like the Tulbul project, this, too, was held up amid arguments from Pakistan that it violated the IWT.
With the treaty now in abeyance following the Pahalgam terror attack, the Union government is planning to hand over the project to state-owned hydropower company NHPC Ltd, which will likely pick up the construction work from where it was left off, it is learnt. Among the suggestions on the table is for the Union government to fund it.
Sources said that the Wular lake project came up after the Union government sought details of projects in the Union Territory that would be affected by the treaty's suspension. These projects were discussed at a meeting involving Union Home Ministry officials where the decision to give the Wular project to the NHPC was taken.
The project aimed to maintain water levels in the Wular lake during the summer, curb encroachments, and mitigate flooding. Sources said it included construction of 2.5-km long flood protection bunds along the lake and a spillway, and strengthening the lake's embankments.
Wular lake, which contributes nearly 60% of Jammu and Kashmir's fish production, has been shrinking due to sedimentation, plantation, agricultural activity and encroachment.
It is also learnt that the Jammu & Kashmir government will likely suggest the revival of the Tulbul Navigation Lock Project to the Union government, besides putting forward a request for a project that allows J&K to draw some water from Chenab to feed Jammu city.
Officials in the J&K government said work on the Tulbul project had started way back in the 1980s and the foundation on the barrage is ready. 'You just have to put the gates. This will allow some water to be held in the Jhelum. It will raise the level of Wular lake, and raise the level of Jhelum upstream,' said an official, who declined to be named.
About the second proposal, the officials said this was a project that the J&K government under CM Omar Abdullah was keen to take up with Asian Development Bank funding. 'But Pakistan got China to scuttle it,' the official quoted above said.
According to the officials, even if the Union government later restores the IWT, it can seek status quo on what has been done in the interim when the treaty was in abeyance.
India and Pakistan have held several rounds of talks on the Tulbul project. In Pakistan's perception, the project structure is a barrage with storage of around 0.3 million acre feet and India is not permitted to construct any storage facility on the main stem of the Jhelum, according to an answer in Parliament in August 2006 by then Water Resources Minister Saifuddin Soz.
The Indian side had then maintained the structure was not a storage facility but a navigation facility as defined in the 1960 IWT. 'Further, Wular Lake gains natural storage and the navigation lock is merely a structure to regulate the outflow from the natural storage to facilitate adequate depth of water for navigation during the winter months from October to February,' it has said.
– WITH ENS inputs
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