No role to play beyond facilitator: World Bank President Ajay Banga on Indus Waters Treaty

World Bank President Ajay Banga. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

World Bank President Ajay Banga has said that the multilateral agency has no role to play beyond a facilitator in the Indus Waters Treaty signed between India and Pakistan in 1960 for sharing of waters of Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab.

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India has suspended the decades-old Indus Water Treaty in the wake of the killing of 26 tourists in a terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam on April 22, 2025.

“We have no role to play beyond a facilitator. There’s a lot of speculation in the media about how the World Bank will step in & fix the problem, but it’s all bunk. The World Bank’s role is merely as a facilitator,” the PIB said in post on X quoting World Bank President, Ajay Banga.

The Indus Waters Treaty, brokered by the World Bank, has governed the distribution and use of the Indus river and its tributaries between India and Pakistan since 1960.

The Indus river system comprises the main river, the Indus, and its tributaries. The Ravi, Beas, Sutlej, Jhelum and Chenab are its left-bank tributaries, while the Kabul river, a right-bank tributary, does not flow through Indian territory.

The Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej are collectively referred to as the eastern rivers, while the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab are known as the western rivers. The water of this river system is crucial to both India and Pakistan.

At the time of Independence, the boundary demarcation between the two newly formed nations — India and Pakistan — cut through the Indus Basin, leaving India as the upper riparian and Pakistan as the lower riparian state.