New Delhi, July 18 -- India has fast-tracked four hydropower projects that are under construction in Jammu and Kashmir and plans are afoot on approving the designs of two more, three officials said on Thursday, highlighting developments after the country's suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan. Work has been accelerated on the 1,000 MW Pakal Dul, 624 MW Kiru, 540 MW Kwar and 850 MW Ratle hydropower projects, all on the Chenab river, and their completion dates have been advanced by several months, with commissioning now scheduled between May 2026 and July 2028, one of the officials cited above said. The Ratle power project is set to be the first one to be commissioned in May next year, an official of the Ratle Hydroelectric Power Corporation Limited (RHPCL) said. RHPCL is a JV between the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation Limited and the Jammu & Kashmir State Power Development Corporation (JKSPDC) Limited. A series of meetings were held over the past month between the Union ministries of power, water resources, private contractors and local utilities, including JKSPDC Limited, to speed up the procurement and supply of labour from other states, a third official said. The power ministry is also evaluating a detailed project report or DPR for the Tulbul navigation project, also known as Wular barrage, which was stalled in 1987 during initial stages of work due to objections from Pakistan. India has stopped sharing information pertaining to the projects after holding the 1960 water pact "in abeyance" following a deadly terror attack in Kashmir's Pahalgam on April 22. Prior to this, India was pressing Pakistan to renegotiate the Indus treaty, citing diminished availability of water amid rising population and power demand. Over the past few weeks, officials have made several visits to the site of the Tulbul project, located near the mouth of Wular, one of Asia's largest freshwater lakes, in Sopore district, a local villager said. Remnants of earlier civil construction in the 1980s of what was to be a barrage meant to hold 0.34 million acre feet of water at Wular are now used by local shepherds as resting platforms from where they keep an eye on sheep grazing in fields on the Jhelum river's bank. Officials say work on the Wular project should get going by early next year after approval of the project design, which will enable all-season navigation over a 20-km stretch of the Jhelum by helping maintain a consistent depth in the river between Baramulla and Sopore sections. Under the erstwhile treaty, total water from the six Indus rivers is shared in the ratio of 80:20 between Pakistan and India. The pact allocates the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, known as the western rivers, to Pakistan and the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, or the eastern rivers, to India. Pakistan has objected to designs in the four projects, especially Ratle, which is a run-of-the-river scheme on the Chenab in Jammu and Kashmir's Kishtwar district. In January this year, a neutral expert under the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague was scheduled to conduct proceedings on points of differences on Ratle, including whether the pondage (water holding area) provided in the designs of Ratle and Kishanganga, another operational dam, is within the norms outlined in the treaty. Pakistan had also questioned the intake capacity for the turbines provided in the design for the Ratle project. A key milestone in the Ratle project came when engineers pulled off diversion of the Chenab river through tunnels at Drabshalla in Kishtwar district in January last year, but Pakistan's objections to this had slowed progress. All told, the four projects have a combined capacity of 3,014 MW. "The long-term plan is to utilise the full potential of about 20000 MW of hydropower in the region. New projects will be possible only when these four projects are finished," the second official said. While putting the water treaty in abeyance in April, a spokesperson for India's external affairs ministry had said the suspension would continue until "Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abjures its support for cross-border terrorism"....