CHENAB VALLEY, Jammu and Kashmir—Shama Begum, wearing a traditional shalwar kameez and a pink scarf draped over her head, sits in her kitchen in Dungduro village, her back pressed against a cracked wall. Now in her late 40s, she grew up in Sewarbatti, not far from Kishtwar district, about a 155-mile journey by car from the city of Jammu.
Her whole life has revolved around the Chenab River. Her family looked after the springs that fed their fields, herded cattle along the riverbanks, and fished the smaller streams, just as their parents and grandparents did. “I spent summers out in the fields, growing beans, rice, maize, fruit,” Shama said. “We used to rest under the trees. But now, we’ve lost our land and cattle.”
CHENAB VALLEY, Jammu and Kashmir—Shama Begum, wearing a traditional shalwar kameez and a pink scarf draped over her head, sits in her kitchen in Dungduro village, her back pressed against a cracked wall. Now in her late 40s, she grew up in Sewarbatti, not far from Kishtwar district, about a 155-mile journey by car from the city of Jammu.
Her whole life has revolved around the Chenab River. Her family looked after the springs that fed their fields, herded cattle along the riverbanks, and fished the smaller streams, just as their parents and grandparents did. “I spent summers out in the fields, growing beans, rice, maize, fruit,” Shama said. “We used to rest under the trees. But now, we’ve lost our land and cattle.”
Kishtwar and neighboring Doda district are packed with thick forests and steep valleys. The region is beautiful. But the reason it is now the object of wider attention is its hydropower potential. India is in the midst of planning to build seven hydropower projects here; four are already underway. These are big projects, meant to pump out 5,190 megawatts of electricity. But they are also turning the lives of more than 20,000 people upside down, especially Indigenous families who rely on the forests and their farms just to get by.
In Doda’s Chenab basin, people are keeping track of how much the springs have shrunk. Community logs show spring flows are down by 30 percent. The big dams upstream, such as Pakal Dul, have messed with the river’s natural peaks, making it even harder for farmers to irrigate their fields. This hydropower expansion marks the hardening of water politics into a security doctrine. Infrastructure now doubles as deterrence, transforming shared rivers into geopolitical tools.
What is unfolding along the Chenab is not just an energy expansion but a shift in how water is governed. As India-Pakistan relations worsen, water once treated as a shared resource under the Indus Waters Treaty is increasingly framed in New Delhi as an asset to be “fully utilized,” even as the country remains formally treaty-compliant. Hydropower expansion in Jammu and Kashmir now serves a dual purpose: advancing domestic energy goals while signaling resolve toward Pakistan in a basin long defined by rivalry and mistrust.
Villages are gone, families forced out, and a lot of people have lost their land. Researchers and locals keep sounding the alarm: These dams, most of them run-of-the-river, bring huge environmental and human costs. Even though run-of-the-river projects often get sold as “low impact,” experts point out that, in mountain areas, the damage really adds up, with big stretches of forest lost, good farmland drowned, and delicate ecosystems on the line.
“While these projects are called ‘run of the river,’ supposedly with small storage, they entail large dams and tunnels, and some, like Baglihar and the proposed Sawalkot project, do have storage that can affect downstream flows,” said Parineeta Dandekar, a river researcher and associate coordinator at the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers, and People. “None of the projects cleared so far violate the Indus Waters Treaty, but their environmental impacts in Jammu and Kashmir have been profound, on protected areas, forests, groundwater springs, river ecology, and downstream stability, particularly in a climate-stressed and politically sensitive basin like the Chenab.”
While legally compliant, the concentration of these projects in Kashmir allows India to maximize upstream operational control in ways that undermine Pakistan, blurring the line between infrastructure planning and strategic signaling to an adversary. These pressures are unfolding in a region already marked by political instability and deep mistrust over shared water resources.
In Kashmir, the shifts are especially consequential. As a heavily securitized and politically contested region, large infrastructure projects face weaker requirements for consent, transparency, and environmental safeguards, turning river governance into an extension of security management rather than a participatory development process.
“Climate change is turning river basins like the Chenab into zones of compound risk where water scarcity, political mistrust, and historical conflict reinforce one another,” said Erin Sikorsky, the director of the Center for Climate and Security. “As glaciers melt faster and droughts intensify, upstream and downstream communities are increasingly suspicious of each other, even when no one is deliberately withholding water.”
Sewarbatti was completely displaced, forcing Shama, her husband, and their three children to relocate to the nearby village of Dungduro. The compensation her family received was insufficient to move to a town. “The money was not even enough to buy a plot, let alone build a proper house,” Shama said. “We built this small house here, but now heavy blasting from the dam construction has caused cracks in the walls. It’s no longer safe to live in.” Pointing to the fissures spreading across her home, she asked, “We lost our land, our means to survive. If this does not make us helpless and poor, then what does?”
The Chenab River, which originates at Baralacha Pass in Himachal Pradesh, flows for more than 300 miles through the districts of Kishtwar, Doda, Ramban, Reasi, and Akhnoor before entering Pakistan.
Climate change is intensifying risks across the entire Himalayan river system. These local environmental disruptions are unfolding against a backdrop of escalating geopolitical tension between India and Pakistan, where shared rivers have long been entangled with questions of sovereignty, security, and power.
“With the onset of climate change, it has become more necessary than ever for countries sharing a basin, such as the Chenab, to cooperate, share information, and respect transboundary agreements,” said Josh Klemm, the executive director of International Rivers, a U.S.-based nonprofit. “Run-of-river projects, despite their supposedly limited environmental impact, are proving to be particularly detrimental to river ecology in the region, triggering landslides, cracks to homes, and disruptions to freshwater systems in a geologically active Himalayan landscape.”
More than two dozen hydropower projects have been planned along the Chenab and its tributaries in Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir alone. The Chenab Valley is also a seismically active region with a history of earthquakes, raising concerns about the safety of large infrastructure projects.
India and Pakistan share the waters of the Indus River system under the Indus Waters Treaty, a decades-old agreement often cited as a rare example of cooperation between the two rivals. But the treaty has come under increasing strain in recent years.
In 2025, India threatened to halt water flows to Pakistan after declaring the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance following a deadly militant attack in Kashmir, prompting Pakistan to warn that any diversion of water would be treated as an act of war. The episode underscored how quickly water disputes in the region can escalate into security crises. In this model, climate stress risks narrowing diplomatic off-ramps between two nuclear-armed states, where water disputes escalate from technicalities to existential threats amid fragile pacts such as the 1988 non-attack agreement.
The Indus Waters Treaty has increasingly shifted from being a confidence-building mechanism to a tool for strategic signaling. Since 2016, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has repeatedly invoked the language of revisiting, restricting, or canceling the treaty after security crises, altering how the agreement functions in public and diplomatic life. After the May 2025 skirmish, New Delhi’s decision to keep the treaty in abeyance signaled that cooperation itself had become conditional and reversible.
This renders India-Pakistan water competition not just a diplomatic issue but a domestic governance and security problem, especially in securitized Kashmir, where dams bypass local consent and eschew transparency. “The Indus Waters Treaty operates in a relationship defined by deep mistrust, where technical legality rarely settles political fears,” said Ashok Swain, a professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University. “Even when India argues that its projects are treaty-compliant, Pakistan often perceives dams and hydropower facilities in Kashmir as creating control over timing and flow that could be exploited during crises. This perception has sharpened since 2016, when the Modi government repeatedly hinted at using water as leverage, turning routine engineering decisions into symbols of coercion.”
A few houses away from Shama lives Naseema Bano with her husband, in-laws, and three daughters. When I visited, Naseema stood on a parapet overlooking her small kitchen garden. After relocating to Dungduro, Naseema made sure to grow vegetables to stay occupied and supplement her family’s food. But she did not anticipate the toll the new environment and the nearby construction would take on her health. “My health has gradually deteriorated,” Naseema said. “I suffer from frequent fevers, coughs, and chills because of the pollution. I rarely go outside now and remain confined indoors.”
When the dams were first proposed, villagers were promised development, employment, better roads, and improved facilities. Residents say those promises vanished once their land was acquired. There is no hospital, school, or pharmacy in the area. “My husband works as a daily-wage laborer at the dam construction site and earns about $340 a month,” Naseema said. “It is hardly enough. We are slowly losing the battle for survival.”
For families displaced by hydropower expansion, the consequences of climate stress and political conflict are already being lived, crack by crack, illness by illness, in homes that were never meant to replace the land they lost. As climate change accelerates and political trust erodes, the costs of treating rivers as strategic assets rather than shared lifelines are increasingly borne by those with the least power to shape decisions made upstream.
