In that context it’s time to also conduct an audit of the thousands of community and family bunkers India built on its disputed border with Pakistan to provide protection to its citizens from cross border shelling. These two are related.
With the Indus Water Treaty back in debate and after India suspending its participation in the agreement, it’s time India focuses on the issue of groundwater resources in the basin.
In that context it’s time to also conduct an audit of the thousands of community and family bunkers India built on its disputed border with Pakistan to provide protection to its citizens from cross border shelling. These two are related.
The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs approved 415 crore rupees in 2018 for the construction of 14,000 bunkers along the international border in Kathua, Samba and Jammu and the Line of Control in Rajouri and Poonch districts.
These included 1,431 community bunkers each of which was budgeted at 10.5 lakhs and 13,000 individual bunkers each of which cost 3.5 lakhs. The bigger-sized community bunkers were built in thick neighborhoods where many families lived in vicinity to each other and the individual bunkers were given to those individual families that lived in isolation and not in clustered neighborhoods.
Since they were built for the protection of border residents from cross border shelling they were built ten feet below the ground level and at a distance easy enough to escape incase of firing. The government has SOPs issued to guide and regulate their construction and I have witnessed both the community and individual family bunkers at multiple locations in RS Pura (Jammu) , Hiranagar (Kathua) and in Nowshera (Rajouri). I have also witnessed a bunker built for a government primary school in the Nowshera sector in 2019.
Basin’s Groundwater Resources
The Indus River basin is one of the largest 37 largest aquifer systems in the world but sadly one of the most 13 depleted aquifers, according to a decade old NASA study.
Laypersons living on the international border would vouch that certain sectors in Jammu and Kashmir were known for their water wells. For example Kathua city comparatively had more water wells–until a few decades ago Jammu city’s temples too boasted of a well each. In the hills one more frequently finds bowlis or surface aquifers. There are a variety of bowlis depending upon the type of their water source. The ground water resources of Kashmir are also historic and uniquely dynamic.
However, surprisingly the Indus Water Treaty doesn’t provide a clear directive on the sharing of the ground water resources between India and Pakistan which can’t be divided like the territorial rivers. This aspect of the treaty is very unscientific because the ground and surface waters are dynamically connected in the basin’s hydrogeological existence.
“The groundwater also forms the main source of the surface water bodies through base flow,” said a report titled “Ground Water Year Book 2022-23 Jammu and Kashmir” by the Central Groundwater Board, North Western Himalayan Region, Jammu.
This unscientific approach to the utilization of groundwater is amply visible since long–even before the Pulwama attack of 2019 and the recent Pahalgam attack brought it back into loud discussions. In 2015 in its report on “Global Groundwater Basins in Distress,” NASA identified the Indus River Basin aquifer as the second most stressed river basins of the world.
“We don’t actually know how much is stored in each of these aquifers. Our current estimates mostly date back to very crude methods developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Few aquifers have improved their storage estimates, and those that have still carry a huge range and uncertainty,” said Alexandra (Sasha) Richey, the lead author of studies on which NASA based its report.
Bunkers in Context of Indus Water Treaty
I have visited old community bunkers in RS Pura international border stretch in Jammu and freshly built ones in the Nowshera sector of Rajouri district along the Line of Control during the past one decade while on reporting assignments.
In wake of the Pahalgam attack and increasing fears of a military escalation between India and Pakistan many media reports have covered border residents cleaning their bunkers. However nobody has ever reflected on the condition of the old bunkers and the livability of the new ones. More importantly we have persistently overlooked how groundwater and rainwater impacts these bunkers.
In the RS Pura stretch, I had found the community bunker very humid with a soggy cemented floor. It was just not possible to ensure them in better condition because of the higher groundwater table in that area. In the Nowshera sector I heard about how rain water fills the bunkers and if cross border firing happens while the bunker is flooded, how it adds to the challenges of the residents.
One particular case story would help us understand the complex reality of border areas in this context. In 2019, while travelling through the Nowshera sector of the disputed border, I met an old couple living with their disabled, adult son. The couple were living surrounded by their fields and were allocated an individual bunker, about 20-30 meters away from their house’s door.
However rain would easily cause flooding of the bunker and I witnessed it during my visit. The old parents in such situations faced a tough predicament of running with their bedridden son into the bunker which was flooded. And those days cross border shelling was happening in the Nowshera sector around the Diwali times.
Imagine the plight of an old couple who would have to run for their lives amidst cross border shelling with a bedridden son into a flooded bunker!
Tough situations obviously produce resilience–however it shouldn’t prevent us from identifying persisting problems and finding solutions. The Indus Water Treaty is an unscientific, redundant treaty and its lack of clarity on the groundwater resources is only contributing to conflict and crisis.
I wonder if it’s possible to find reason with Pakistan, an adversarial neighbour that funds and supports terrorism in some of the most picturesque locations of the Indus river basin on the Indian side; utilizes its forests and caves as hideouts and its rivers’ floodplains as conduits. It’s high time that the Indian government start to first seek an internal clarity on what should be a national management mechanism for the entire Indus River Basin and what kind of crossboundary relations and diplomacy it will seek in the future in this constantly changing context.
It’s also important to conduct an immediate audit of the bunkers it built for its border residents, identify the problems they face because of the unscientific nature of a political boundary and provide avenues for engineering innovation to resolve their architectural flaws.