More than 10 people including women and children died while dozen others were injured in separate incident of roof collapses and other mishaps related to rains in different areas of the country on Sunday.
Heavy rains continued to lash various areas of the country flooding the rivers, nullahs, inundating the low lying areas, resulting in closures of roads, disconnecting far flung areas with main town due to landslides, destroying crops and agricultural lands rendering millions of rupee losses to general public and government. Every year during the monsoon season floods cause immense loss of lives and infrastructure in most parts of the country. But it seems that our policy makers have failed to handle the situation miserably. Politicians visit to the flood effected areas and pledge to the affected people that they would not see the same situation next year but their promises prove nothing more than rhetoric. It is the time to formulize a comprehensive water management policy to put a full stop on the sad story of floods. It is another dilemma that India leaves water into the rivers during the floods which adds more worries to handle the situation. Over the last few years India has also released massive amount of water in Pakistani rivers and has used rivers under its control as weapon of water terrorism. The Government it seems has not taken any concrete steps to increase the disaster management capacity and limit the damage caused by floods.
The situation is not all that different in Karachi which was inundated in rain water after rain of merely few millimeters, with heavier rains expected in the coming days in Sindh the scale of the damage by flood could extend all the from Chitral to Karachi which will burden the already stretched resources and may hamper flood relief activities. Pakistan has not constructed any major dams in the last couple of decades.
Government has failed miserably to find solutions to tackle the devastation from floods.