Dr. Ikramul Haq & Engineer Arshad H Abbasi
The July 2025 ruling of the Supreme Court of India is more than a legal document—it is a watershed moment in South Asia’s ecological history. For decades, both India and Pakistan have treated their rivers as instruments of politics, their mountains as mere construction sites, and their people as passive recipients of donor narratives and governmental neglect. With rare candor, Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan shattered this illusion by pointing to the unvarnished truth: the Himalayas are collapsing under the weight of reckless human intervention, and unless immediate action is taken, entire regions like Himachal Pradesh may vanish from the map.
This ruling is a humiliation for the Modi government which has long celebrated hydropower projects in Jammu and Kashmir as symbols of national pride, but in truth, they are tools of political coercion against Pakistan. The dams built there serve neither the valley’s residents nor the wider Indian population in need of cheap, sustainable electricity. They are built not for light bulbs in Indian homes but for headlines in nationalist speeches. It is equally a disgrace for Islamabad, where the Ministry of Climate Change and the Ministry of Water Resources remain in deep slumber, content to outsource national policy to donor-driven NGOs and self-proclaimed climate experts.
For over a decade, Pakistan’s climate discourse has been hijacked by opportunists masquerading as experts. These non-government organizations (NGOs) operator, armed with borrowed jargon—resilience, adaptation, carbon footprints, sustainability—paraded themselves on donor circuits, but produced neither serious research nor engineering blueprints. Their idea of climate activism was writing donor reports, attending five-star conferences, and reciting clichés about “climate justice”. When Sindh was submerged by floods in 2022 or when Balochistan’s aquifers dried, these quacks were missing. They had no hydrological data to present, no embankment plans, no reforestation schemes—only press releases.
Worse, they turned the deeply technical issue of water security into a reckless political campaign by calling for a revision of the Indus Waters Treaty. They neither understood Himalayan hydrology nor the ecological consequences of dam-building, yet they marketed this idea aggressively abroad. And tragically, it was India—not Pakistan—that eventually took the idea forward, suspending the Treaty in April 2025. What Pakistan’s NGOs had used as donor bait became New Delhi’s policy tool. This exposes the hollowness of Pakistan’s “climate champions”, who have been little more than career opportunists.
India, however, cannot claim moral high ground. Its fixation on hydropower has created a humanitarian and ecological time bomb. The Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej rivers, lifelines for millions, have been mutilated by dams, reservoirs, and unregulated tunneling. The 2023 Himachal Pradesh floods, followed by the devastation of 2025, demonstrate that the damage is largely man-made. Four-lane highways blasted into mountains, multi-story concrete hotels on unstable slopes, unchecked deforestation, and the ceaseless drilling of tunnels in both IHK and Himachal Pradesh have turned heavy rains into catastrophic disasters.
The Indian Supreme Court’s words were unambiguous: hydropower comes with “considerable environmental costs”. It reminded policymakers that Himachal Pradesh is not an engineering playground but a living ecosystem, one whose survival depends on consultation with geologists, ecologists, and local communities. The Bench’s warning that even the mighty Sutlej has been reduced to a rivulet is a devastating indictment of India’s hydropower obsession.
What makes India’s policy choices indefensible is the availability of far better alternatives. Today, solar and wind energy cost nearly half as much as hydropower per unit. Large-scale solar parks in Rajasthan already deliver power at record low tariffs, while wind farms in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu demonstrate scalability. Himachal Pradesh alone has over 50 GW of solar potential, according to the National Institute of Solar Energy (NISE) and the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA), of which 15–24 GW could be harnessed immediately. Distributed rooftop solar could empower rural households, reduce grid dependency, and provide resilience during natural disasters.
Ladakh possesses a staggering 1,314 GW of wind potential—one of the largest untapped reserves globally—while Jammu and Kashmir holds nearly 5,700 MW of wind capacity alongside vast solar potential, according to the National Institute of Wind Energy (NIWE). Together, these three Himalayan regions could power India’s renewable revolution. Unlike hydropower, which destroys slopes and rivers, solar and wind coexist with ecosystems. Unlike dams, which are vulnerable to droughts and glacier retreat, solar panels and wind turbines thrive in those very conditions.
It is sheer folly that India continues pouring billions into dams when its people could have cheaper, cleaner, and safer electricity from the sun and wind. The Supreme Court has indirectly underlined this reality: hydropower is no longer viable in an age of climate volatility.
The deeper significance of this ruling lies in the contrast it reveals between India and Pakistan. In Pakistan, “climate experts” turned water security into a donor circus, producing slogans but not science. In India, the debate, however delayed, has entered the courts, led by judges willing to rely on engineers and genuine climate change experts rather than NGO press releases. This is the difference between hollow activism and serious governance. Yet, both countries are guilty: Pakistan for tolerating quackery, India for indulging in reckless hydropower nationalism.
This dual failure exposes the hollowness of political leadership on both sides. Modi’s government, obsessed with symbolic dams in Jammu and Kashmir, has ignored the economic logic of renewables. Islamabad’s ruling elite, paralyzed by donor dependency, has allowed NGOs to dictate the climate agenda without results. In both cases, ordinary citizens suffer—whether from flash floods in Himachal or from water scarcity in Sindh.
The authors of this analysis—one an economist/lawyer, the other an engineer, each with over 35 years of experience—offer a clear recommendation. India must abandon their outdated obsession with dams. Hydropower is not cheap, not clean, and not sustainable. Its human, ecological, and financial costs now outweigh its benefits. The future lies in solar and wind—a combination that can deliver electricity at nearly half the rate of hydropower, while preserving ecological balance.
For India, this means halting new dam projects in Jammu and Kashmir, where construction serves political agendas rather than public needs. For Pakistan, this means expelling the quacks from the climate discourse and replacing donor theatrics with serious, science-based policy. For both, it means listening to the Indian Supreme Court’s golden words: development without ecological planning is suicide.
Although India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty in April 2025, the Indian Supreme Court’s judgment is, in effect, its ecological reinstatement. By emphasizing the fragility of rivers and mountains, the Court reminded both nations that water is not a weapon but a shared lifeline. Political Regimes can collapse, but ecosystems, once destroyed, cannot be rebuilt.
This is why the ruling deserves appreciation. It is not just a legal verdict; it is a scientific and moral rebuke. It has done the job that ministries on both sides failed to do. The shame lies not with the judges but with the governments that forced them to intervene.
South Asia now stands at a fork in the road. Down one path lies hydropower vanity, NGO quackery, and ecological collapse. Down the other lies renewable energy, serious science, and ecological balance. The choice is stark but simple.
If India continues to build dams in the name of politics, it will betray its own people first, condemning them to floods, blackouts, and rising power costs. If Pakistan continues to tolerate charlatans as climate experts, it will remain unprepared for floods and droughts, forever dependent on donors. Both nations must recognize that their real wealth lies not in damming rivers but in harnessing sunlight and wind.
The Indus Waters Treaty may one day be reinstated formally, but its spirit has already been revived by the Supreme Court of India. It has reminded South Asia of an ancient truth: rivers are not tools of geopolitics, but veins of life. The question now is whether leaders in Delhi and Islamabad have the wisdom to act—or whether they will squander this final warning, leaving behind a legacy of broken dams, broken treaties, and broken futures.
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Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds LLD in tax laws. He was full-time journalist from 1979 to 1984 with Viewpoint and Dawn. He also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 1996.
Engineer Arshad H. Abbasi, water and climate change expert, is co-founder of Energy Excellence Centres at NUST and UET Peshawar.