Though cautiously welcoming Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani’s recent overtones on Siachen, India is not ready to buy his claim that the military presence on the icy heights is affecting the climate change.
Though cautiously welcoming Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani’s recent overtones on Siachen, India is not ready to buy his claim that the military presence on the icy heights is affecting the climate change, depleting “shared water resources”.
Officials in New Delhi suspect that Pakistan may be injecting the new element of climate change in the Siachen lexicon as a ploy to invite international attention for de-militarisation of the region. They counter Kayani’s bogey with an official study’s report that the glacier has hardly retreated in the last 50 years.
The study for the Ministry of Environment and Forests was conducted by a Geological Survey of India team headed by its former director General VK Raina. It noted that all glaciers in the Himalayas were not shrinking. It says: “Siachen glacier showed an advance of about 700 metres between 1862 and 1909, followed by an equally rapid retreat of around 400 metres between 1929 and 1958, but hardly any retreat during the last 50 years.”
Pakistan and its army chief are hankering on reports of two studies on the Himalayan glaciers melting faster by 30 per cent over the past 10 years that have been already debunked. These studies, without any check on the ground, were conducted by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Siachen glacier is the source of the Indus river, which caters to 75 per cent of Pakistan’s irrigation requirements, and hence it is in its interest to resolve the dispute of the military camps at the highest icy height in the world.
Efforts to resolve the dispute gained pace last year in February when prime minister Manmohan Singh and his counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani mandated officials on the sidelines of the SAARC summit in Bhutanese capital of Thimpu to produce a result oriented action plan. Dr Manmohan Singh’s over-delayed trip to Islamabad is linked with some “doable” that can be shown as results.
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