By Syeda Aaleen Hussain
At Taunsa Barrage, I watched the Indus slow before passing through the gates. The river seemed immense, yet profoundly vulnerable. Then, a grey back broke the water’s surface, an Indus River dolphin, one of fewer than 2,000 left in the wild, according to WWF. That brief encounter highlighted a grim reality: the Indus is suffocating under human pressure.
The crisis is both quantifiable and alarming. According to WWF-Pakistan, dams and barrages have fragmented the river, reducing the dolphin’s historical range by 80 percent and isolating surviving populations. Meanwhile, a 2013 study by the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank focused on regional security and environmental policy, found that over 90 percent of Pakistan’s municipal wastewater and 99 percent of its industrial sewage is discharged into streams and canals completely untreated. Beyond toxic dyes and raw sewage, a 2017 research by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research ranks the Indus as the world’s second-highest contributor of mismanaged plastic waste to the oceans.
Our current environmental regulations fail because rivers are legally treated merely as property. Weak enforcement allows polluters to treat nominal government fines as a minor cost of doing business, regulating pollution levels rather than shielding ecosystems reaching their breaking point.
Granting rivers the “Rights of Nature” offers a far superior shield. When a river is recognized as a legal person, it gains the inherent right to exist, flow, and remain unpolluted. Independent legal guardians comprising community members, scientists, and legal experts are appointed to speak for it. If a factory dumps toxic waste, these guardians can sue the polluter directly in the river’s name, demanding immediate court injunctions and restoration funds dedicated entirely to ecological clean up.
Real-world examples show that treating nature as a living entity actually works. After Colombia’s Constitutional Court gave the Atrato River its own legal rights in 2016. This allowed local citizens to step up as the river’s official guardians and successfully block destructive, illegal gold mining. The ruling proved so successful that it became a permanent pillar of Colombia’s National Development Plan. Similarly, New Zealand granted the Whanganui River the same legal rights as a person in 2017, the government created a $30 million restoration fund and forced all building projects like ports and bridges to be designed alongside local communities. Bangladesh went even further in 2019, becoming the first country to grant all of its rivers the legal rights of a living person, a historic decision upheld by its Supreme Court.
Pakistan has already taken its first steps down this path. In the 2021 D.G. Khan Cement case, our own Supreme Court ruled that the law must treat the environment as a holder of legal rights to protect our rapidly disappearing groundwater. While state-led initiatives like the Living Indus project offer hope, they are not enough. Our rivers need permanent, absolute legal protection. For millennia, the Indus has carried our history, nourished our fields and sustained millions of lives. Recognizing the legal rights of the Indus is no luxury or academic experiment; it is the only way to safeguard the lifeline of our nation for generations to come.
