Nepal’s water resources sharing: lower riparian rights with reference to Mahakali treaty

Abstract

The demand of fresh water is increasing day by day due to the increasing number of population to fulfilling the requirements for urbanization and industrialization. The major challenging tasks in today's context is to lay out the suitable procedure specially for those countries which are the basin states of water resources or the countries which shares common international rivers. Reasonable and equitable utilization of water of International River is today's major demand. In international arena common water resources can be taken for both aspects such as it has shown to be a good catalyst for cooperation between nations but on the other hand sometime it creates some disputes and misunderstanding between basin states. South Asia is one of the regions that has had to deal with some of the most difficult disputes over international water rivers, while for some cases it has been successful to implement proper treaties and agreements in between the basin states. The purpose of this study is to portray the nature of water relationship between India and Nepal based upon Mahakali Treaty. Additionally, the geographical condition, water sharing pattern, brief study of treaties and agreements associated with Mahakali Treaty also will be the central idea of this study. Highlighting the lower riparian rights according to the customary and international laws is another agenda of this study.