An aerial view taken from a Pakistani air force helicopter showing a flooded area in Shujabad Punjab province yesterday.

Internews/Islamabad

The riverine floods have been raging in Pakistan’s eastern province of Punjab for more than a week now. After wreaking devastation, the flood water cleared the rice zone and by the weekend was on the rampage in the southern part of the province, known as the cotton belt.

Though it is too early to assess the final figure of the damage, initial estimates put up by the official agencies are alarming.

By Thursday evening, the floods, to varying levels, had affected more than 1m acres of the rice zone. It hit 1.8m people, mostly farmers, along with 800,000 livestock.

Since the flood entered Pakistan through the rice zone (upper and central districts of the Punjab), the crop was first to take the hit. According to growers, out of these 1m affected acres, more than half were under the rice crop and the rest mainly fodder.

Both these crops are highly important for the farmers; one sustaining their lives, the other their livestock. With both these crops greatly impacted, the farmer may have a financially difficult some put it as disastrous year ahead.

As per farmers’ initial claims, they fear more than 15% loss in rice yield, which in monitory terms means anything between Rs20bn to Rs25bn. What makes it worst for farmers is they would suffer the entire loss individually.

Even if 10 acre per family is taken as an average, the floods have already financially destroyed over 70,000 farming families in one part of the province and repeating the performance in the other part.

What makes these floods psychologically more damaging for farmers, is the reality that the flood pattern has been same for the last many centuries. These areas, because they fall on the foothill of the water generating
systems, suffer the most.

The water runs down quickly from hills, leaving no time for them to recover, and the successive governments have left them at the mercy of this unchecked quantum and flow of floods.

This year, the Met office issued an alert on September 1, and this alert was converted into a warning on September 3 and floods hit the area the next day.

If flood data is something to go by, the current one is flood No. 24 in the last 50 years, making it almost alternate year phenomenon. During the last four years, it has been the second major flood in the same area. Despite this documentation, the floods visit these areas regularly, and remain unchecked.

As history has it, three rivers - Jehlum, Chenab and Ravi - broke their banks this year as well and inundated vast areas.

But even before them, their tributaries had caused the main damage before falling into main rivers and causing cumulative flooding.

The Jehlum was tamed to some extent by Mangla dam, though it could still be questioned whether more water could have been absorbed in the lake through in-time controlled releases. Still, it took a large impact.

It was Chenab, along with four major tributaries - Dek, Basanter, Dain and Palkhu - that devastated the rice zone.

For the last 67 years, these tributaries have been converted into a recipe for disasters by different state and private structures, hampering their flow instead of making efforts to smoothly channelise them into Chenab.

Railway lines, roads and bridges have been built by the state with narrow passages, which become part of the problem in times of floods.

The official response to this recurring tragedy is also a classic case of kneejerk; a well advertised compensation package, which has no relation with the scale of loss.

Even this year, both federal and provincial governments put together have so far announced Rs2bn against initial estimates of around Rs25bn losses of rice zone alone.

This compensation package is not for crop losses alone, but includes all kind of losses; deaths, total or partial home damages, medical and other logistics.

 

 

 

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