Tribal fears mount in Himalayas with end of Indus water treaty

• India suspends landmark water-sharing deal with Pakistan
• Push for hydropower to hit tribal communities
• Experts worry about environmental damage

KEYLONG, India - Just a few hundred kilometres southeast of Kashmir, a new front over water sharing is emerging in India's conflict with Pakistan as it plans a raft of hydropower plants that threaten the Himalayan ecosystem and the communities it has sustained.

The decades-old conflict between the nuclear-armed neighbours flared anew in April, when militants killed 26 people in India-controlled Kashmir in an attack that India blamed on Pakistan and retaliated with airstrikes.

Although a ceasefire in May brought the countries back from the brink of war, tensions are rising over another flashpoint: the waters of the Indus river basin.

The day after the Kashmir attack, India announced it would "put in abeyance" the Indus Waters Treaty, the Cold War-era agreement that divided control of river systems that have an annual flow of roughly 200 billion cubic metres (7 billion cubic feet) of water.

Brokered by the World Bank in 1960, the treaty has been one of the world's most enduring water-sharing accords, surviving even full-blown wars between Pakistan and India.

But the suspension has sparked uncertainty over the treaty's fate and opened the door for India to push energy development along the Himalaya Mountains' riverways.

Within days of saying India would halt its participation in the treaty, Prime Minister Narendra Modi instructed his ministries to fast-track long-stalled infrastructure projects on the western rivers of Chenab, Jhelum and Indus.

These waterways, control of which was assigned to Pakistan, irrigate Pakistani farms downstream and were largely off-limits for Indian exploitation under the treaty.

At home in India, the prospect of accelerating hydropower projects has also sparked alarm.

The tribal communities in the windswept valleys of Lahaul and Spiti in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh fear that damming the rivers could destroy a generations-old way of life.

Building boom

Supporters of the project say the Indus basin can provide the world's most populous country with a source of clean energy and help meet the world's demand for energy storage.

The Himachal Pradesh government already announced in January plans to build 22 new hydropower projects with a combined capacity of 828 megawatts across five districts, including Lahaul-Spiti.

The Chenab river, formed by headwaters in Lahaul-Spiti, will see the largest share, with nine hydropower plants totaling 595 MW, according to the plan.

India may also build four reservoirs on tributaries of the Chenab and Jhelum rivers.

Policy experts see India's strategy as a bid to assert control over the Himalayan waterways.

The suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty allows India to "pursue its development interests on the western rivers," said Srinivas Chokkakula, president of the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

India now has the "time and means to build infrastructure to accumulate irrevocable leverage," he said.

Existential threat

For people living in Lahaul and Spiti, such political calculations may pose a threat to their livelihoods and traditions.

Among them are the Bodh people and the Swangla tribe, whose languages and cultures are tied to Tibet. Isolated for much of the year by snowbound passes, these communities farm the rugged mountain slopes during the warmer months.

The Lahaul-Spiti Ekta Manch, a collective advocating for tribal and environmental rights, has identified at least 14 large dam projects that are currently proposed along the Chenab and its tributaries.

The push for hydropower poses an existential threat to both the landscape and the people it nourishes, said Rigzin Sampil Harpa, a senior member of the collective.

"We don't know what it will result in for Pakistan, but it's going to ruin our lands and will leave us with nothing," said Harpa, who lives in the village of Kawaring, a sparsely populated Spiti village tucked between glacial streams.

The Himalayan valleys hold a significant share of India's glaciers and are home to a ecosystem that is already showing signs of stress from climate change.

Glaciers are rapidly retreating, and springs that have long irrigated small-scale, monocrop agriculture are drying up.

Most households here depend on a single crop cycle of potatoes or peas, fed by community-managed irrigation networks.

These traditional systems are designed for the water-scarce landscape and may not withstand dam-building, which includes rerouted rivers, disrupted aquifers, altered microclimates and increased sedimentation, said Ramlal Markanda, a former agriculture minister from Himachal Pradesh.

"Any such advancement will wipe out the very identity of Lahaul and Spiti," he said.

Guman Singh, a conservationist working with the grassroots Himalaya Niti Abhiyan group in the town of Mandi, warned that the Chenab and Chandrabhaga rivers are already prone to glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF) and are now being treated as blank slates for mega-infrastructure.

A GLOF is the release of meltwater during the failure of an ice dam that can unleash catastrophic flooding downstream.

"In the race to assert nationalism through water control, India is accelerating construction in one of the most climate-vulnerable zones in the country," Singh said.

"When you block and dam these natural systems, you're asking for more landslides, floods and eventually collapse."

Context contacted the Himachal Pradesh government, as well as the Tribal Affairs Ministry and the secretary of the Power Ministry in New Delhi, but did not receive responses.

Harpa, who has campaigned against dam projects in the region since 2007, said he fears not just environmental degradation but cultural erasure.

"These projects will bring a wave of outsiders and commercial activity into a region with limited capacity to absorb them," he said.

"The influx will strain our resources, drive up land prices and erode our culture. What makes us who we are - our customs, our connection to the land - will slowly disappear."

(Reporting by Anuj Behal and Rohit Singh Parashar; Editing by Ayla Jean Yackley.)