Floods in Pakistan: A Man-made Disaster

Blaming the Rain for a Man-made Disaster

Every year, it’s the same story. The sky turns a menacing grey. The clouds get heavy. The rain comes down in sheets. And then, we act surprised when everything floods. We feign shock when the country we love is, once again, underwater.

I am writing this opinion in late July, and the news is a tragic rerun of a show we’ve all seen before. Country-wide floods, especially across Punjab and KPK, and maybe to some degree Balochistan, have rampaged cities. The images are heartbreakingly familiar. Since the monsoon began in late June, the toll has been horrific: the UN, citing the National Disaster Management Authority, reported that at least 63 casualties and 290 injuries occurred in just 24 hours, pushing the nationwide toll since the seasonal rains began on 26 June to over 120 fatalities.

Homes have been swept away like toys. Entire families are stranded on rooftops, waving at a sky that offers no reprieve, waiting for a helicopter that might come to a few accessible areas. A dam has collapsed in Chakwal after receiving 400 mm of rain overnight, triggering flash floods. Lahore and Rawalpindi are submerged. It’s the 2022 nightmare, back for a sequel.

The easy excuse is to point a finger at the sky and say, “climate change.” And yes, the weather is getting wilder; the monsoons are more intense. No one denies that but blaming the climate is the lazy answer. It is the comforting lie we all maintain to avoid gazing into the mirror and face the grim and infuriating truth.

The reality is that the floods in Pakistan are man-made calamitiesf. They are the symbol of inexcusable, wholesome, and statewide governance failure, planning, as well as political willfulness year after excruciating year. The core of the issue points to a crisis of competence.

Let’s break down this self-inflicted wound. It’s not complicated.

We Build Houses Where Rivers Are Supposed to Live

For decades, we have committed the cardinal sin of building on land that doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the rivers. We have allowed a free-for-all of illegal and unregulated construction in and around natural floodplains and riverbeds. It’s like building your house in the middle of a highway and then acting shocked when you get hit by traffic.

Local authorities turn a blind eye, powerful real estate developers get their way, and a concrete jungle sprouts where water is meant to flow. As experts have repeatedly pointed out, many civilian casualties can be traced directly to the illegal construction of homes near riverbeds. Every collapsed home on a riverbank isn’t a victim of rain; it’s a victim of a permit that should never have been issued and a law that was never enforced. When the water comes, it is not invading our cities; it is simply reclaiming the path it has carved out for centuries.

The Country’s Plumbing Is Terminally Clogged

Imagine your house sink is blocked. You wouldn’t just stand there and watch the water overflow, ruining your kitchen and flooding your home. You’d clear the drain. It’s basic maintenance. Our cities and towns are like a house with terminally clogged drains. The canals and “barsati nalas” that are supposed to carry excess water away are choked with garbage, silt, and illegal encroachments.

Most of the urban drainage installations, which are a mere remnant of the ancient days, are either criminally unmanaged or overwhelmed by just an hour of downpour. There is nowhere to dump this water, and thus it overflows in our streets, our markets, and our houses. This is not a climate catastrophe; it’s a national plumbing crisis born from sheer neglect.

We Are Addicted to the Emergency Photo-op

The pattern is sickeningly predictable. First, the meteorological department issues warnings that are largely ignored. Then, the disaster hits and then, the performance begins.

Our focus remains on reacting to disasters rather than preventing them. We have perfected the art of “disaster tourism,” where leaders visit flooded areas for a photo opportunity, expressing their deep “sadness” before flying back to their dry homes. Our efforts are geared towards begging the world for aid to manage the emergency, while we neglect to invest in the boring, unglamorous, long-term infrastructure that would make the emergency unnecessary. This approach to floods in Pakistan is akin to hiring a thousand firefighters while refusing to install a single smoke alarm.

This isn’t just about bad policy. It’s about the devastating human cost that we choose to tolerate. It’s the farmer in a village near the Jhelum River, now under a high flood alert, who loses his crops, his livestock, and his home for the third time in a decade. It’s the shopkeeper in Lahore who watches his entire life’s inventory float away. It’s the child whose school is now a shelter for the displaced, their education washed away with the floodwaters. It’s the family that invests its life savings into a small home, only to see it crumble into mud because of someone else’s corruption and a collective failure of governance.

This cycle of predictable tragedy kills more than just people. It kills hope. It kills progress. It keeps our nation trapped in a loop of destruction and rebuilding, constantly cleaning up a mess we could have, and should have, avoided. We don’t need more high-level committees. We don’t need more international donor conferences where pledges are made and rarely fulfilled. We need to do the simple, boring work that builds resilient nations.

Enforce the building codes (strictly). Stop people from building in stupid places and clean the drains. Invest in modern water management systems, construct and conserve city green space to absorb water. Focus more on the cure rather than prevention. The rain is just water; it’s not evil. It is a test of our foresight, our discipline, and our collective will to govern ourselves properly. And for decades, our leadership and, to some extent, our society have been failing that test most spectacularly.

Ultimately, this reveals a crisis of character, and we are all drowning in its consequences.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.