With one-third of the country submerged, over 1,300 people dead, and a further 630,000 displaced by devastating flash floods, citizens across Pakistan are asking who and what is to blame and how can they prevent this from happening again.
Some political leaders have used this as an opportunity to criticise the previous government, while others have turned to the age-old trump card of blaming India.
These accusations against India have been echoed by several journalists and social media influencers, who have attributed the deadly floods to India’s decision to open its dams. In fact, this is not the first time the Pakistani press has floated this narrative; India’s decision to open the Baglihar dam on the Chenab River, too, was presented as the reason behind the 2014 floods.
Admittedly, India is an upper riparian country, which means that opening dams can increase the water flow in Pakistan. Moreover, during the recent floods, India did open its dams on the Ravi and Chenab Rivers, which was said to have pushed regions around the rivers to a moderate to high risk of floods.
Pakistan and India signed the Indus Water Treaty in 1960 to set up a mechanism to determine their respective water rights and address concerns about the Indus but have very different interpretations of the same document. Pakistan argues that India cannot construct a dam on the western rivers. India, however, asserts that it is allowed to build dams over rivers allotted to Pakistan because they do not interfere with river flow.
There’s no media coverage on the floods in Pakistan, and by the way this isn’t a natural disaster.
— عمر (@champagnepvki) August 25, 2022
India has been conducting environmental terrorism as they control dams on rivers that lead into Pakistan, and multiple times in the past as well as now, they release the water.
These divergent interpretations have for years fuelled the narrative that India is to blame for all water-related disasters in Pakistan.
However, the primary factor behind this calamity—as is so often the case in Pakistan—is decades of government oversight, mismanagement, and corruption.
Pakistan lags severely behind its neighbours in constructing dams, which are critical for flood mitigation and water management. India, for example, has 5,202 dams, while China has built 98,000 small and large multipurpose dams. Pakistan, on the other hand, has a meagre 164 dams. As a result, while India can store enough water to last 100-120 days, Pakistan has storage for merely 25 days.
Apart from being unable to control river flow to prevent flooding in low-lying areas, the absence of dams also pushes regions such as Balochistan and Sindh, which have borne the brunt of this year’s floods, into a gruesome cycle of floods and droughts.
In fact, Pakistani Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman warned that the same areas that are submerged under water right now could face droughts in the weeks to come.
Despite acknowledging this possibility, however, Rehman attributed this to climate change rather than gross government mismanagement.
Successive governments with leaders from across the political aisle have failed to adapt to and learn from these disasters. In 2010, for instance, ‘super floods’ left one-fifth of the country submerged, killing up to 2,000 people and causing $10 billion in damages.
Hard to comprehend the scale of the flood disaster in Pakistan, the 5th most populated nation in the world.
— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) August 30, 2022
Nearly 1400 dead, 1 million houses damaged or destroyed, and 50,000,000 people displaced.
1/3 of the country is underwater.pic.twitter.com/NFd15q3g7I
Apart from the failure to build dams, authorities have also authorised or turned a blind eye to various other infrastructural deficiencies. For example, the 2010 floods tore down several cheaply-constructed buildings in Swat and Narran that were built on poor foundations close to river banks. Yet, high-rise buildings were once again built on the same foundations and unsurprisingly collapsed during this year’s floods.
Another example of authorities’ failure to learn their lessons from the past is the absence of a proper and functional flood warning communication mechanism. In 2010, several districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were not warned about the floods due to a broken fax machine. Similarly, 118 districts submerged in this year’s floods were not given any warnings.
This lack of preparation is also evident in Pakistan’s decades-long failure to effectively collect data that identifies flood-prone areas and vulnerable communities to reduce damage to people and property.
Admittedly, authorities did make an effort to change this approach back in 2002 with the River Act and in 2014 by introducing an amendment to curb illegal constructions on river sides.
Yet, the implementation of these laws is sparse, making the legislation largely redundant. The majority of the damage in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region this year, for instance, has been reported in areas where commercial activities encroached on the Singh, Kabul, Swat, and Kunhar rivers.
As is the case with most issues in Pakistan, the lack of flood management infrastructure and mechanisms can be attributed to virtually perpetual political instability in a country where not a single prime minister has completed their term.
Soon after entering into the Indus Valley Agreement with India in 1960, it set up its first two dams with World Bank funding. However, since then, the construction of dams has become politicised.
Meanwhile, India is frantically funding & building as many dams in river Indus flowing in Pakistan as possible, not only to take advantage of the fresh water available from it but also to be able to open floodgates towards Pakistan at will resulting in flooding in Pakistan:
— Malik Khurram Khan Dehwar (@KhurramDehwar) August 27, 2022
/3 https://t.co/scvjTVOuJC
For example, in 1979, opposition leaders blocked efforts to construct the Kalabagh dam despite authorities having secured the required funding. After a tiff with erstwhile President Zia ul Haq, the Pakhtun Nationalist Party and other Sindh nationalist groups opposed the project. Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party also remained silent on the issue over fears of losing political influence in Sindh.
In the 1990s, then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif attempted to revive the project but halted it after facing political opposition. These same pressures forced General Pervez Musharraf to back down from pursuing the project as well. The dam’s construction has thus been shelved.
Dam constructions have also faced allegations of corruption, with officials often selling land for higher than their actual value and pocking the surplus, such as in the case of the now-suspended construction of the Diamer Bhasha Dam.
Taking all of this into consideration, rather than pointing the finger at India, Pakistan should instead look inwards to reverse decades of damage by neglectful governance. In the absence of a clear commitment to addressing infrastructural deficiencies, it will only be a matter of time before the next episode of deadly floods.