Dr. Ikram ul Haq & Engineer Arshad H Abbasi
Pakistan is drowning again. Not in surprise, but in betrayal. The floodwaters of 2025 have ravaged Punjab, sweeping away homes, crops, and lives. Millions are displaced. Billions in losses are mounting. But let us say it without hesitation: this was not just a flood. This was manslaughter by incompetence.
Nature struck, yes. But the real disaster was made in offices, not rivers. The Federal Flood Commission and the Punjab Irrigation Department—those charged with defending us—designed our collapse. Their crumbling embankments and neglected defences turned a natural flood into a man-made massacre. This is not a tragedy of rain. The real challenge is a lethal combination of incompetence and corruption.
The warnings were never hidden. After the flood of 2010, Justice Mansoor Ali Shah of the Lahore High Court then authored the report aptly titled A Rude Awakening. It named the culprits. It warned of systemic neglect, poor maintenance, and bureaucratic indifference. Yet no one resigned. No one was punished. No reforms were carried out. And so, fifteen years later, history returned with even greater cruelty. The levees collapsed like sandcastles, barrages gave way, and entire villages vanished beneath the waves.
Flood mitigation structures are supposed to be lifelines. Levees, dams, floodwalls, diversion channels—these are not luxuries, they are guardians. Their mission is simple: hold back water, save lives, protect homes. Civilizations have known this for millennia. Ancient Mesopotamians built earthen levees. The Indus Valley engineered canals. But in today’s Pakistan, those guardians have been turned into death traps. When the rivers rose this year, our embankments did not resist. They crumbled like wet sand.
And why? Because they were never built to last. International standards demand embankments of sandy-clay soil with solid cores, seepage control, slope protection, and continuous monitoring. Ours were built with cheap material, weak cores, zero drainage, and criminal neglect. Erosion ate them away year after year. Seepage hollowed them from within. Slopes collapsed under pressure. Maintenance was an illusion, budgets looted. The 2025 flood did not surprise anyone who has watched Pakistan’s rivers. Failure was not accidental. It was inevitable.
This failure is not born of this decade. Its roots stretch back centuries. Under the British Raj, flood management was stripped from local communities and handed over to colonial hydrology. The great Indus floods of 1841 and 1858 were met not with adaptation but with engineering obsession—massive embankments, canals, and barrages. Traditional systems of water harvesting and floodplain management were discarded. Nature was caged. Floods were redefined as “natural calamities” that only technology could “fix.” Pakistan inherited this legacy, but perfected its worst habits. We built walls, but never maintained them. We drafted reports, but never acted on them. What was once a colonial experiment has become a national curse.
The rivers have warned us again and again. The Chenab’s fury of 948,530 cusecs in 1992. The Ravi’s 576,000 cusecs in 1988 and the Sutlej’s 597,000 cusecs in 1955.
Each flood was a thunderous reminder. But we slept. Reports were shelved, files buried, and warnings dismissed. Then came 2010, another collapse. Then 2022, another disaster. Now 2025, another massacre. How many times must rivers roar before we listen?
This year’s flood was apocalyptic. Embankments broke like toys. Barrages groaned under pressure and failed. The stored fury of rivers was unleashed on farmland and cities. The Punjab government admits the staggering toll: two million people affected, entire villages erased, homes and roads drowned, crops destroyed, farmland ruined, billions lost in property and agriculture. Families climbed rooftops, clutching children against their chests as the waters rose. Farmers watched their year’s harvest vanish in minutes. The poor watched the only walls they owned dissolve into mud. This was not nature’s fury. This was betrayal’s harvest.
And yet, we hear the same excuse every time: climate change is blamed. Yes, the rains are heavier, the weather more erratic, the floods more frequent. But let us not be deceived. Climate change is the spark, not the explosion. Strong defenses resist. Weak defenses collapse. And Pakistan’s defenses were deliberately left weak. Funds siphoned. Warnings ignored. Reports buried. The water did not just break walls—it exposed decades of lies.
Why does this happen again and again? Because accountability in Pakistan is always buried deeper than the victims. After every flood, a commission is formed, a report is written, headlines scream for a few days, and then silence. The guilty retire with perks. The cycle resets. The people pay with blood. Justice Mansoor Ali Shah’s report in 2010 named the culprits. And yet, in 2025, the same culprits are in charge, the same embankments collapse, the same excuses are made. If this is not criminal negligence, what is?
The 2025 flood will be remembered not just for its water, but for its betrayal. A country already drowning in debt has now lost billions more. Farmers who fed the nation are now bankrupt. Families who had little to begin with now have nothing at all. Millions displaced may never return to normalcy. Infrastructure will take years to rebuild. And yet, the institutions that failed us sit untouched. The Federal Flood Commission still writes reports. The Punjab Irrigation Department still signs off on budgets. The same men who signed off on weak embankments still draw salaries. This is not governance. This is betrayal.
Pakistan cannot afford to mourn floods every decade as if they are destiny. They are not. They are preventable—if institutions are reformed, if accountability is enforced, if flood management shifts from rhetoric to resilience. Embankments can be rebuilt with science, not shortcuts. Budgets can be transparent. Reports can be public. And failures must bring punishment, not promotions. Engineers who signed off on defective structures must be named. Bureaucrats who ignored warnings must be removed. Until that happens, Pakistan will continue to drown in water and in silence.
The tragedy of 2025 is not only the water that drowned villages. It is the silence that followed. A silence that says, “This is normal.” A silence that lets institutions escape. A silence that guarantees we will drown again in 2030, or 2035. Unless it is broken.
Pakistan has been betrayed. Not by rivers—they have always flooded. Not by rain—it has always fallen. But by its own institutions. By its own engineers. By its own bureaucrats. Floods do not kill. Corruption kills. Neglect kills. Betrayal kills.
In 2025, two million Pakistanis learned this truth the hardest way possible. And unless we demand change, unless we force accountability, unless we rebuild with honesty, the next flood will teach it again. And again. And again. Until Pakistan is not just drowned in water, but in history’s contempt.
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Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds LLD in tax laws. He was full-time journalist from 1979 to 1984 with Viewpoint and Dawn. He also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 1996.
Engineer Arshad H. Abbasi, water and climate change expert, is co-founder of Energy Excellence Centres at NUST and UET Peshawar.