Indus, or the Sindhu as it is known in India and Pakistan, is a landscape-defining river of the Indian Subcontinent to which India owes its name. Sindhu is eulogized as the ‘Queen of rivers’ in the ancient text of Rigveda and with a drainage area exceeding 1 million square kilometers and length of 3180 kilometers, it is one of the fifty largest rivers in the world in terms of average annual flow. It arises from the storied Lake Manasarovar (also known as Mapam Yumtso in Tibetan) in Tibet, held sacred in Buddhism and Hinduism, flows through the Union territory of Ladakh in India onto Pakistan where it flows from north to the south of the entire country, meeting the Arabian Sea at the Port of Karachi. Indus and its five largest tributaries irrigate and nurture one of the most populated and fertile regions in the world, supporting a population of over 268 million. The basin faces serious transboundary tensions, climate related disasters but also an astounding syncretic unity which holds the power to further peace and prosperity for an entire subcontinent.
