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The Himalayan region illustrates a paradox of abundance, where immense hydrological wealth coexists with intensifying water insecurity driven by climate change, urban pressures, and extractive development
The International Mountain Day once again reminds us that mountains are not remote peripheries. They are central to water security, ecology, and the political economy of development through hydropower, timber, minerals, and critical nodes of urbanisation and tourism. Sadly, however, mountain ranges worldwide, such as the Andes and the Himalayas, bear a contemporary form of ‘resource curse.’ They are embedded in extractive growth models that externalise environmental costs while exploiting their indispensable ecosystem services and strategic commodities. This paradox of abundance, in which environmentally sensitive, resource-rich regions are infrastructurally and socio-economically underserved, provides a framework for understanding the current challenges and dependencies in the Himalayas.
The Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region sustains nearly two billion people through 12 major river basins. It has rich hydrological systems and unparalleled ecosystem services. Yet it faces a polycrisis of climate extremes, deforestation, declining groundwater levels, rapid urbanisation, and lagging services. For example, Leh, once sustained by traditional water management practices, is now facing severe groundwater depletion and contamination. Shimla, the former summer capital of British India, is still unable to meet the growing demand from a rising population despite several water supply augmentations over the years. Severe shortages loom in the summer. Turbidity becomes a challenge in the monsoons, and heavy rainfall, landslides, and flooding in catchment areas make long-term planning difficult. In Nainital, the water level of Naini Lake, the city’s main source of water, has dropped to 4.7 feet, its lowest in five years. In Nepal, the people of Samdong village in Upper Mustang had to relocate after the glacier-fed stream supporting their water needs dried up. Bhutan’s water availability is high at an estimated 80 billion cubic meters, yet some communities still face chronic scarcity. These facts highlight concerns of infrastructure, planning, and distribution.
These cases highlight a stark contradiction: while the HKH region supports the greatest rivers on the continent, it is also grappling with some of the most acute and multi-layered forms of water insecurity.
These cases highlight a stark contradiction: while the HKH region supports the greatest rivers on the continent, it is also grappling with some of the most acute and multi-layered forms of water insecurity. Therefore, there is an urgent need to protect, restore, and govern Himalayan waters in ways that are ecologically resilient and socially just.
A complex dynamic of the precipitation patterns, snow and glacial melt, and groundwater flows determines the HKH’s hydrological system. The region is endowed with the third-largest ice mass after the polar regions, receiving an annual precipitation level of 3000 mm, which is three times the global average of 1000 mm. The distribution of this rainfall varies from the Western to the Eastern Himalayas: the monsoon dominates the eastern Himalayas, while western disturbances supply up to half of the winter precipitation in the western Himalayan belt. The region also has 54,252 glaciers occupying 60,054 km² and an estimated ice reserve of 6,127 km³. Despite this bounty, the region witnesses multi-scalar risks.
The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment of 2019 underscored the reshaping of precipitation regimes, snowmelt cycles, and glacial retreat, which, exacerbated by climate change, impact the region’s long-term water security. Additionally, the mountain springs, which are critical socio-ecological systems providing vital ecosystem services, including water for consumption and agriculture, are drying up due to land-use changes, road construction, reduced infiltration, and changing rainfall patterns. A single spring with a perennial discharge of 10 litres of water per minute has an annual capacity to yield approximately 5,000 cubic meters. With at least 2 million such springs in the Himalayan region, the existing annual water flow potential of 25 billion cubic meters thus forms the base flow of rivers. Drying up of the springs, therefore, has much larger and widespread consequences.
A single spring with a perennial discharge of 10 litres of water per minute has an annual capacity to yield approximately 5,000 cubic meters. With at least 2 million such springs in the Himalayan region, the existing annual water flow potential of 25 billion cubic meters thus forms the base flow of rivers.
These hydro-climatic shifts aside, the region’s water governance landscape is complex, with both formal and informal institutions, and a tendency to prioritise and augment centralised piped supply projects over community-driven decentralised traditional practices. These gaps render the region’s water systems vulnerable to both climatic and anthropogenic stressors.
Climate change and urbanisation have thus impacted the water-provisioning services in the HKH region. Growing urbanisation has led to rapid, large-scale infrastructure development in Srinagar, the largest urban centre in Western Himalaya, and in the urban centres of Gangtok, Kalimpong, and Darjeeling in Eastern Himalaya, changing the region’s land use and land cover. Established by the British as hill stations on mountain ridges and summits, many of these towns and cities, including Darjeeling and Shimla, depend on the surface water sources in the valleys. Therefore, scarcity is structurally embedded in their urban design.
Mountain towns and cities are also popular tourist destinations, adding pressure on water resources. Water consumption increases with seasonal tourist influxes. Given tourism’s contribution to the state economy, water allocations often favour hotels and commercial establishments, prioritising the needs of tourists over those of local residents, thereby creating stakeholder and social conflict. This phenomenon creates temporal compression, which coincides with urban growth, tourist influx, and the monsoon, turning hazards into catastrophic events. The unregulated growth of tourism has also led to the proliferation of tourist infrastructure, such as hotels, homestays, tourist vehicles, and parking lots, often resulting in encroachment on ecologically sensitive areas. The total number of tourist arrivals in Himachal Pradesh in 2024 alone exceeded 1.8 million.
Mountain towns and cities are also popular tourist destinations, adding pressure on water resources. Water consumption increases with seasonal tourist influxes.
The existing infrastructure challenges further exacerbate scarcity. In Darjeeling, for example, many households depend on private tankers for water. With the rising cost of water, many city dwellers are compelled to compromise on the quality of drinking water. With urbanisation and tourism as stressors in the water crisis of the HKH region, the contradictions lie not only in environmental scarcity but also in governance failures, infrastructural neglect, and development trajectories that are derailed from ecological realities.
Addressing the paradox of Himalayan waters requires an integrated, equitable, and climate-resilient water governance. Monitoring climate change trends, cryosphere changes, hydrological variability and impacts is as important as mapping water sources and their recharge areas. Resilience planning must be rooted in the specificity of mountain ecologies and include future demand and supply scenarios under changing climatic conditions. The nature of dependence of the local communities on the different water sources must be understood because, in a water crisis scenario, women and socio-economically marginalised groups are often disproportionately affected. Above all, when situating the Himalayas within the larger political economy of development, the asymmetric flows of value must be disrupted to ensure that core-periphery inequalities are not reproduced.
Soma Sarkar is an Associate Fellow with the Urban Studies Programme at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Soma Sarkar is an Associate Fellow with ORF’s Urban Studies Programme. Her research interests span the intersections of environment and development, urban studies, water governance, Water, ...
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