The latest flood warnings issued by the country’s weather agency for low-lying areas of Islamabad and several cities, including but not limited to Lahore, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Hyderabad, and Tando Allahyar, have, for the umpteenth time, exposed a crippling infrastructural weakness that seems to be growing manifold with every new housing scheme or road. That even a season expected to bring less rain overall can still overwhelm a city when a heavy spell arrives within a few hours speaks volumes about Pakistan’s urban centres, which have tried every trick in the playbook to reduce their carrying capacity through years of poor decisions.
Every now and then, seminars are held to remind the authorities of the gross mishandling of the urban sprawl. For starters, we do not share credible data with city engineers, who need rainfall data measured by the hour, and sometimes by the minute, rather than assumptions inherited from plans drawn decades ago. The expansion of concrete has altered the movement of water. Rainwater once spread across open ground, ponds, fields and wetlands. Much of that land is now paved. Since natural channels have been narrowed, diverted or built over (thanks to road levels, medians and underpasses often planned without studying how runoff will move through surrounding neighbourhoods), ordinary Pakistanis are reduced to sitting ducks every monsoon.
The much-talked-about pre-monsoon desilting drive cannot compensate for weak waste collection throughout the year. A drain cleared in summers will soon choke again if garbage and construction debris continue to enter it. Similarly, dewatering pumps may shorten the time water stands on a road, but they cannot repair an undersized channel or restore a watercourse buried beneath concrete.
It goes without saying that responsibility is scattered across development authorities, water agencies, municipal bodies, provincial departments and disaster bodies. Each controls a part of the urban system. None is answerable for the whole drainage system. The result is often duplication during an emergency and blame after the water recedes. Local governments, which should handle street-level maintenance and enforcement, remain the weakest part of this arrangement.
The damage is also distributed unequally. Better-off households can raise entrances, install pumps and replace damaged possessions. A low-income family, when faced with similar circumstances, may lose a lifetime of savings in just one spell.
At the risk of sounding repetitive, these pages urge the authorities to act against construction over waterways, including projects backed by influential developers. Informal settlements cannot be cleared selectively while larger encroachments are regularised or ignored. It can only be hoped that before the next monsoon, local authorities would be much better prepared, with transparent, credible information about housing schemes, drainage systems and overall infrastructure. *
