Critically examine the World Bank's role as guarantor of the Indus Waters Treaty in light of recent disputes over the treaty's arbitration mechanism.

Signed in 1960 after nine years of World Bank-brokered negotiation, the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) made the Bank a signatory with a deliberately limited and procedural role — chiefly designating individuals for Neutral Expert or Court of Arbitration proceedings [1]. Recent disputes show this narrow mandate is both the Bank's strength and its structural weakness.

Where the Bank's role has worked

• It supplied the neutral third-party guarantee that made a partition-era water settlement possible, allocating Eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej) to India and Western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) largely to Pakistan.
• The Treaty's graded machinery — "questions" to the Permanent Indus Commission, "differences" to a Neutral Expert, "disputes" to a Court of Arbitration" — kept technical friction below the political threshold for decades [1].
• The Bank has, at times, acted with restraint: in December 2016 it "paused" appointments in the Kishenganga–Ratle matter precisely to avoid contradictory outcomes [3].

Where it has faltered

• In October 2022 the Bank simultaneously appointed a Neutral Expert and a Court of Arbitration Chairman on the same projects [2] — a parallel track India argues the Treaty's sequential design does not permit.
• India therefore treats the Court as illegally constituted, has never appeared before it, and rejected its award as lacking jurisdiction [4]; an arbitral finding one party never contested carries little authority.
• Lacking enforcement powers, the Bank can neither compel compliance nor interpret the Treaty, exposing the limits of "guarantor" status.
• Its procedural machinery is silent on the political trigger that now dominates — India's decision, after the Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025, to hold the Treaty in abeyance until Pakistan abjures cross-border terrorism [5].

The Bank remains an indispensable convenor but was never designed as an adjudicator. A durable revival lies in reactivating the Permanent Indus Commission and negotiating a modernised Treaty addressing climate stress and security concerns, with the Bank restored to its original facilitative role.