Drowning in Neglect: Floods Claim Millions Again
Asem Mustafa Awan
Islamabad: Pakistan’s riverbanks are once again teeming with desperation. Thousands of people — families, farmers, labourers now live in makeshift shelters, huddled under plastic sheets and tin roofs, waiting for food, clean drinking water, and medical assistance that never comes on time. For them, this is not just monsoon season it is survival season.
What the country faces today is not a freak disaster, nor an unexpected calamity. It is a recurring collapse, born of policy failure and hardened by indifference. And while the skies pour down, another flood brews across the border one of strategy, control, and deliberate manipulation.
India, long accused of waging a quiet water war against Pakistan, has now mastered the game. When it suits New Delhi, water flow is stopped through upstream diversions. At other times, excess water is released without warning, drowning Pakistani villages downstream. This dual strategy of engineered scarcity and sudden flooding turns nature into a weapon — one Pakistan seems helpless to defend against.
The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, brokered by the World Bank, was once hailed as a triumph of diplomacy. Today, it stands shredded in spirit. India’s recent retreat from dialogue mechanisms, coupled with aggressive dam-building on western rivers like the Chenab and Jhelum, threatens not just agriculture, but national security. When water is withheld during sowing season and released en masse during the monsoons, the result is not just drought or flood — it is devastation by design.
But blaming the neighbour is not enough. Pakistan’s deeper wounds are self-inflicted.
In 2022, catastrophic floods submerged a third of the country. Over 33 million people were displaced, with more than two million homes damaged or destroyed. It was a disaster of such scale that the world responded with compassion — pledging billions in aid and flying in relief teams from across the globe.
Yet three years later, many of those displaced remain where the waters left them — without land, homes, or livelihoods. The relief goods intended for them surfaced not in camps, but in markets. Turkish tents and food rations meant for the flood-hit were openly sold in Pakistani bazaars. Government warehouses, stocked with essentials, failed to distribute them in time, if at all. And in typical fashion, no accountability followed.
Today, new flood warnings have been issued in Sindh, Punjab, and parts of Balochistan. The ground is already saturated. Villages are bracing for another round of evacuations. But the disaster management machinery remains underfunded, undermanned, and unmotivated. Lessons were never learned, because those in charge never had to suffer.
According to the World Bank’s most recent report, 45 per cent of Pakistanis now live below the poverty line. That means nearly half the country is at immediate risk in any natural disaster — unable to recover from loss, unable to rebuild, and utterly invisible to the policymaking elite. These are not just victims of weather, but of systemic neglect.
Climate change has only accelerated the threat. Glacial melt in the north, unregulated deforestation, and erratic monsoon cycles mean that floods are no longer anomalies — they are inevitabilities. Yet there is no national flood adaptation policy, no riverbank strengthening, and no credible relocation plans for the vulnerable. Most of the national budget goes into elite subsidies and debt servicing, not disaster resilience.
Meanwhile, the political class remains obsessed with optics. Leaders visit flood zones in convoys of SUVs, distribute photo-op rations, and return to Islamabad to hold press conferences about “committees” and “future frameworks.” In the villages, people continue to drink contaminated water, children suffer from skin diseases, and pregnant women wait for medical help that may never come.
Read More: https://thepenpk.com/a-climate-of-urgency-for-pakistans-farmers/
The contrast is criminal. The state watches its citizens sink, literally and metaphorically, while the powerful profit from every stage of the crisis — from construction contracts to relief theft.
The reality is grim: this is no longer a country responding to natural disasters. This is a country orchestrating its own collapse through incompetence, corruption, and the strategic abandonment of its poorest. Whether the water comes from melting glaciers, torrential monsoons, or India’s upstream releases, the outcome is the same: it is the poor who drown, and the corrupt who swim.
There is no excuse left. There is only choice. Pakistan can continue down this path — of blame, neglect, and criminal silence — or it can finally treat flood vulnerability as a national security issue. That means building flood-resistant infrastructure. That means holding bureaucrats accountable for stolen aid. That means building diplomatic muscle to challenge India’s water aggression. That means putting people, not profit, at the centre of disaster policy.
As the rivers rise once again, the question must be asked: How many more lives must be lost before the state understands that silence is not neutrality — it is complicity?
Thousands wait on the banks, watching the clouds and the current. They are not waiting for the next storm — it has already come. They are waiting for a government that sees them. And for now, they wait in vain.
The article is the writer’s opinion, it may or may not adhere to the organization’s editorial policy.
Asem Mustafa Awan has extensive reporting experience with leading national and international media organizations. He has also contributed to reference books such as the Alpine Journal and the American Alpine Journal, among other international publications.
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