Dr. Ikramul Haq & Engineer Arshad H Abbasi
A land once nourished by the mighty Indus River system, fed by glaciers and seasonal rains, is now gasping for severe water and food security. The devastating floods of 2010, 2022, and now 2025 laid bare the country’s fragility: entire districts submerged, millions displaced, billions lost. Yet the most disturbing truth is not only the unkindness of rivers or the harshness of climate—it is the silence, apathy, corruption, and collapse of the very institutions built to defend this nation from disaster. Around the world, universities and research institutions act as clinics of solutions. They not only study problems but also diagnose, innovate, and prescribe remedies. They forecast floods, redesign irrigation, mediate water conflicts, and guide governments with evidence.
The Netherlands, through TU Delft and Deltares, transformed into the most flood-resilient nation on earth, exporting its models to Bangladesh, Vietnam, and even New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Israel’s universities pioneered drip irrigation, making deserts bloom. India’s IIT Roorkee, (where the Engineer AHA co-author visited to observe its excellence), IIT Kanpur, and IIT Kharagpur trained generations of engineers who designed dams, restructured irrigation, and managed groundwater.
Institutions like Oxford, the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), and the University of Colorado turned water science into diplomacy, helping mediate disputes in the Nile Basin, the Mekong, and the Colorado River. These are universities as healers, turning knowledge into protection and peace. Then there is Pakistan. Despite having more than 133 engineering universities and specialized institutions such as the Centre of Excellence in Water Resources Engineering in Lahore, the USA–Pakistan Centre for Advanced Studies in Water at Mehran University, and the Water Management Research Centre at the University of Agriculture in Faisalabad, the country has nothing to show.
These institutions, meant to be the beating heart of applied research, the guardians of water security, instead, have become monuments of failure: lavish buildings, state-of-the-art laboratories, and foreign-qualified faculty drawing fat salaries, yet producing little more than academic papers that gather dust.
While universities abroad produced models and policies that saved lives, Pakistan’s centres of excellence (sic) could not even demarcate floodplains after half a century. This failure has been catastrophic.
Housing societies were built inside the Ravi riverbed near Lahore. Hotels rose illegally on the banks of the Swat River. Unzoned embankments collapsed like paper walls when torrents arrived. Year after year, the floods returned, and year after year, nothing changed, because the very institutions created to prevent such disasters remained silent.
Into this vacuum stepped opportunists. For more than a decade, Pakistan’s climate debate was hijacked by an overtalkative Minister for Climate Change and a crowd of self-styled experts who misled the world with sweeping claims that the glaciers were “melting away.” This was a distortion of science. The truth is far more complex.
The “Karakoram Anomaly”, a term coined in the 1980s by geographer and great glaciologist Kenneth Hewitt, refers to the surprising stability—and in some cases growth—of the Karakoram’s high-altitude glaciers, a phenomenon in stark contrast to the global pattern of retreat. Hewitt’s pioneering studies pointed to thermal shifts and altitude effects as possible explanations.
The science did not stop there. Building on his work, Fuming Xie led a 2023 study showing that the anomaly may now be weakening as warming intensifies. Scientists including Daniel Farinotti, Walter Immerzeel, Duncan J. Quincey, and Amaury Dehecq advanced the field through their landmark study Manifestations and Mechanisms of the Karakoram Glacier Anomaly.
Closer to home, Engineer Arshad H. Abbasi, a Pakistani Engineer, spent years studying glacier hydrology, hydropower and water management, warning policymakers against misrepresenting science. Yet the noise of quacks drowned out these voices. Ministers and pseudo-experts turned climate change into an industry of self-enrichment, feeding on donor funds and media airtime while silencing the nuance of science. By repeating the mantra of melting glaciers without context, they betrayed both research and the millions whose survival depends on the Indus Basin.
The collapse of research governance can be traced to the Higher Education Commission (HEC). Instead of mandating applied research with clear performance indicators, the HEC buried the country’s future under irrelevant metrics. Promotions and prestige were tied to publishing in so-called impact factor journals, often on subjects disconnected from Pakistan’s crises.
There was no requirement to design flood forecasting models, the need for dams, improve irrigation efficiency, or manage groundwater sustainably. Even worse, bizarre projects such as the 2011 “Maintenance of Scientific Equipment” secured public funds and elevated its principal researcher to the position of Vice Chancellor. In what rational universe can maintenance reports pass as research while millions drown?
Meanwhile, universities abroad continued producing solutions. The University of Cape Town helped the city avert its Day Zero water crisis with demand-management strategies. ETH Zurich integrated climate models into Europe’s water policies. Tsinghua University pioneered sponge cities to combat urban flooding. These institutions acted like doctors for sick water systems. Pakistan’s universities abandoned the patient altogether, leaving the nation’s water security to politicians and self-promoters.
The cost of this collapse is catastrophic. Pakistan’s per capita water availability has plunged below 750 cubic meters per year, dragging it into absolute scarcity (World Bank). Yet agriculture, which consumes over 90 percent of water, still relies on wasteful flood irrigation. Water-intensive crops dominate, while yields remain dismal. Storage capacity is barely 30 days, compared to the 120 days recommended for arid countries.
Each monsoon, torrents devastate lives before vanishing into the sea unused. Each dry season, the country thirsts. Groundwater, once the poor farmer’s refuge, has been plundered recklessly. The Indus Basin aquifer, one of the most overstressed in the world, is being depleted faster than recharge. Industrial effluents and agricultural runoff poison what remains. Children in cities drink contaminated water, while farmers irrigate with supplies that are salt and kill their soil. Yet Pakistan’s universities have not produced a credible groundwater monitoring system or a national policy for sustainable use.
Yes, climate change is real, and Pakistan is undeniably vulnerable to it. But instead of confronting its own failures—especially the inability to curb air pollution—the country has turned climate change into an excuse for inaction and mismanagement.
Monsoons are shifting, extremes intensify, glaciers retreat in the lower reaches. But natural shocks become disasters only because the systems to withstand them do not exist. Elsewhere, universities have built risk maps, flood forecasting models, and adaptive infrastructure. In Pakistan, floods arrive like ambushes because the very institutions tasked with protection failed to act.
The silence is most dangerous in transboundary water management. The Indus Waters Treaty, signed in 1960, remains the backbone of peace between India and Pakistan. Yet today, reckless voices call for its suspension, as if tearing up treaties could solve Pakistan’s water crisis. Where are the scholars who should be guiding this debate with research and diplomacy? Where are the hydrological models, the scenarios, the strategies? Instead of sober scholarship, Pakistan has loudmouths and chaos-makers, gambling with national survival.
At the very hour when Pakistan drowns in its worst floods, when millions are displaced and lives hang in the balance, the nation desperately needs clarity, knowledge, and solutions rooted in science. Yet what it receives instead is chaos masquerading as wisdom. The debate has collapsed into shouting matches—shrill quarrels over dams, barren arguments about barrages and canals, reckless cries that the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 was a historic mistake.
In this vacuum of reason, new sycophants and quack practitioners have stepped forward, thriving not on knowledge but on confusion, wielding rhetoric as if it were policy, and spreading suspicion against the very infrastructure that sustains life.
The most tragic silence is not that of the rivers, but of the water excellence centres and engineering faculties that should have been the nation’s shield. Institutions that once promised to be the architects of resilience have abandoned their duty, leaving a void where research, evidence, and solutions should stand. Into this silence, pour opportunists—NGOs, quacks, and over spoken generalists—men and women who posture as saviours but deliver only disorder in the media. They turn every flood into a theatre, every dam into a conspiracy, every treaty into a weapon of discord.
The global community must understand that Pakistan’s water tragedy is not inevitable or fait accompli—it is undoubtedly man-made. This is not a call for charity. It is a call for accountability.
Donors must demand performance audits of Pakistan’s water excellence centres and every official who served in the Higher Education Commission from 2000 to 2025. Without such reckoning, nothing will change. Pakistan will remain a country that drowns in floods, thirsts in droughts, quarrels over treaties, and squanders its rivers in silence.
The true tragedy of Pakistan’s water crisis is not that nature is harsh. It is that knowledge has been silenced. Universities that should have been the doctors of this crisis became its accomplices. The HEC, which should have nurtured applied research, nurtured corruption instead. Politicians and opportunists replaced competent engineers, economists and scientists. Unless Pakistan learns from the world, unless its institutions rise to act as true guardians, the Indus will write the same verdict it wrote 5,500 years ago for Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Civilization here will not end because of rivers. It will end because of silence, incompetence, and betrayal.
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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.