World Bank
By L. F. RUSHBROOK WILLIAMS AGOVERNMENT statement made recently has ,,reiterated India's earlier warning that she will be unable to supply water to Pakistan from the `eastern' riverS of the Indus Basin after 1962. Once more, the Pakistan Government and press have reacted angrily to this 'four-year ultimatum'; they accuse India of violating agree- ments, and of planning to `reduce Pakistan to a desert.' Indian spokesmen retort that Pakistan knows the position perfecty well; and that if she does not take proper precautions to meet the situation which will arise in four years' time, the consequences will fall upon her own head. But fortunately, bad temper on each side has not discouraged the World Bank from continuing its good offices to work out a solution which both countries can accept to the problem of dividing the waters of the Indus Basin.
Considerable progress has, in fact, been made; and by next October, when the World Bank holds its annual meeting in Delhi, it may even be possible to reach agreement on the main steps Which need to be taken to take the dispute of . political controversy into the more , hopeful atmosphere of a committee on ways and means. The attention of the negotiators on both sides is tending to focui more and more closely upon two questions. How much should India pay? And, where is the money to come from?
If all goes well, and the problem of utilising the Indus Basin waters to the maximum advantage reverts to what it was in the time of the British raj—a problem of engineering ingenuity in re- lation to financial resources, uncomplicated by considerations of international law and of national prestige—there is real hope that it may ultimately be removed from the formidable list of irritants which have too long poisoned rela- tions between India and Pakistan. Should this hope materialise, the credit must go very largely to the patient, persistent endeavours which the World Bank has pursued throughout the last six years. These endeavours are particularly commendable because the Bank itself has not hesitated to revise its own suggestions from time to time in the light of fresh facts, always with the greatest possible respect for the sovereign rights and national susceptibilities of the two countries. It has worked consistently to persuade both sides that progress is only possible if they are willing to consult the engineers rather than the politicians. This, in a sense, is as it should be. For though the engineers may not be wholly responsible for the situation which exists today, it is they who prepared the way for it, and it is they who can best find a remedy. During the years when the irrigation experts of the British raj planned the development of the six great rivers of the Indus Basin, they understandably did not foresee that in time to come an international frontier would cut clean across the area which they were treating as a hydrographical unity. When partition came, an international frontier— wholly artificial from the engineering point of view—gave Pakistan 18 million acres of irrigated land in the Indus Basin, where India had a mere 5 million acres, although 35 million acres on India's soil were crying aloud for irrigation: and, to make matters worse, the headworks on the Ravi and Sutlej rivers controlling the water which irrigated Pakistan's eastern canal colonies passed to India.
The situation plainly called for joint manage- ment of irrigation works, projects and plans. This was so self-evident at the time that both Lord (then Sir Cyril) Radcliffe and Sir Patrick Spens, who presided respectively over the par- tition commission and the arbitral tribunal deal- ing with claims and counter-claims, accepted unhesitatingly the assurances given them by their Indian and Pakistani colleagues that arrange- ments then in being would continue until new joint arrangements were made : indeed, at least one award was made on the strength of this specific understanding. Unfortunately, this sen- sible idea, which became gradually more tenuous as bitterness grew out of the tragedies which partition brought to both countries, finally perished when the Indian Government of East Punjab in April, 1948; cut off supplies to Pakistan's canals from the headworks on the Ravi and Sutlej rivers. Although an agreement was patched up in May, this action inspired Pakistan with a profound distrust of Indian activities, and opened the way for the dispute which has raged ever since. Pakistan has con- tinued to urge her strong legal claims to the use of the water which has always come to her canals from the Ravi and Sutlej: India has continued to insist that since partition these rivers are hers, and that the flow to Pakistan, being dependent upon her own act of grace, remains `at her dis- cretion.'
Tension steadily grew, and has ever since been periodically intensified whenever shortage of water cuts down the supplies of water which Pakistan receives from India under the interim arrangements made by the World Bank. Feeling bad already risen so high by 1951, when Mr. David Lilienthal, formerly of the Tennessee Valley Authority, visited India, that he feared an explosion in the immediate future; and his ventilation of this danger in an American periodical induced the World Bank to proffer its good offices in 1952. The Bank's first plan was perhaps too theoretical : it did not take sufficient account of the fact that although Pakistan would be getting an estimated 80 per cent. of the total flow of all the Indus Basin waters, much of this flow would be quite unusable without expensive storage dams because it comes down in spate only for a matter of a few weeks every year. India accepted the proposed division; but Pakistan's initial hesitation proved so far justified by the subsequent findings of independent hydro- logical consultants that in 1956 the World Bank modified the original scheme, suggesting that India might either continue to supply a modicum of 'winter' water to Pakistan's eastern canals, or should help to pay for storage works.
Neither India nor Pakistan liked these sugges- tions very much. But they did supply that element of realism which the original plan needed, and they have since provided the main framework within which later negotiations are taking place.
Earlier this year the World Bank put forward suggestions for what would be the most sensible arrangements, from the purely engineering point of view. But they have little chance of being accepted, although they would save India a very large bill. This bill will no doubt be scrutinised in detail next October; it is unfortunate that it should come up for consideration at a time when India's difficulties under the Second Five Year Plan are already causing anxiety. But special loans to India to meet this expense would be a good investment for the Western world, at a time when Indo-Pakistani tension cannot but handi- cap the development of the two largest Common- wealth countries in South-East Asia along peace- ful and progressive lines: and it can hardly be doubted that the World Bank, at least, will do its best to see that its own long work of 'honest broking' is not frustrated at the last for lack of funds to implement it.
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