FLOOD IN PAKISTAN 2010:

There are many questions emerging from the recent floods in Pakistan, ranging from
attempts to understand the atmospheric phenomena behind the downpours to the search
for where ultimate responsibility lies for the resulting human misfortune. This short essay
investigates some of those questions.

A pinch of geography is necessary to explain why Pakistan received such an

extraordinary amount of rain during this rainy season. The Indian monsoon can be
understood as a giant sea-breeze, with ocean moisture sucked in by rising hot air over the
South Asian plains. It is influenced by large scale weather patterns such as the jet stream
in the northern hemisphere, which this year came to a halt as a consequence of Rossby
Waves, powerful spinning wind currents created by the earth’s rotation. Such unusual
occurrences – called ‘blocking events’ – have taken place in the past, and have resulted in
unusual weather phenomena. This year, as the jet stream became stationary, unusually
hot summers led to the breakout of wildfires in Western Russia, and unprecedented rains
poured down the slopes of the Western Himalayas. The blocking event coincided with the
summer monsoon, which brought unusually heavy amounts of rain on the mountains that
girdle the north of Pakistan.

The intensity of the localized rainfall was fantastic – four months worth of rainfall had
fallen in just a couple of days. Some areas in Northern Pakistan received more than three
times their annual rainfall in a matter of 36 hours. Gushing quickly down the tributaries
into the Indus River, the rainwaters gave rise to floods of catastrophic proportions. Given
the immensity of the downpours, some flooding was inevitable. Yet rivers are essentially
channels to drain out water; being one of the largest rivers of the world, the Indus should
have been able to carry out the excess waters into the Arabian Sea which it joins near
Karachi. Why could the river not flush out the excess waters? This is where human
intervention – in terms of water resource planning and infrastructure development –
played an important role in the floods.

To increase the area under irrigation in Pakistan, more and more of the waters of the
Indus River have been diverted in recent decades into nearby farms. Many of these farms
are owned by the richer farmers who have, with state support and over the years, built
levees or embankments along the river to protect their farms from the occasional floods.
It is not only the Pakistani government but local councils and water resource planning
authorities in all the countries in South Asia which have supported such ‘straight-
jacketing’ of rivers. Yet each human interference into a natural river system has its
consequence: when excessive amounts of water are drawn out of its channel, a river
channel becomes less efficient and loses its ability to quickly move the water. When
levees are built along the banks, the sediments get deposited on the river bed, which
gradually rises above the surrounding plains. Not only does this enhance the flood risk,
the levees standing as walls also make it difficult for the floodwater to return back into
the channel once it has spilled over.
In the last few decades, water and irrigation infrastructure within the Indus system has
increased in size and number. Indeed, over two thirds of the Indus flow is now diverted
for irrigation. A number of tributaries also join the Indus from the west. These are fast-
flowing hill torrents that bring down huge quantities of silt during the monsoons (because
the Himalayas is one of the youngest mountain ranges in the world, rivers that originate
there like the Indus bring down enormous quantities of sediments in the form of sand, silt
and clay). With funding from the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, a series
of barrages have been built along the hill slopes to prevent their waters from reaching the
Indus. When many of these barrages failed, they added waters to the already inflated
Indus and contributed to further worsening of the flood situation.

Besides the frozen jet stream that caused the unusual rains, then, it is the water
infrastructure on the Indus River and its tributaries that are to blame for the scale of
human impact of the floods in Pakistan. One can safely say that the floods were partly
‘anthropogenic’ in that they were caused by careless planning of water resources.
Engineers and water planners have often given insufficient consideration to the sediment
load that gets carried within the banks of the river channel, and through the interventions
of their infrastructure they exacerbated this year’s flood. They created a false sense of
security amongst the rural peasants, whose lives and livelihoods were washed away in the
floods.

Water planning as it has been practised in Pakistan certainly carries benefits for some
segments of the rural communities, specifically those rich farmers who own the farming
lands. When key pieces of infrastructure such as barrages fail, however, innumerable
people’s lives can be plunged into utter distress. The political ecology of the water
infrastructure is such that those who benefit from them are usually not those who suffer
from the floods; although the water resource planning is done in the name of improving
the lot of the poor, it is they who suffer most when the technology fails.

If something good can at all come out of the enormous human tragedy that Pakistan has
been confronted with, it should be a rethinking of river development and planning not
only in that country, but entire South Asia. No one could have possibly predicted or
prevented the floods. It was by all measures an unusual natural event exacerbated by
human folly in terms of water resource planning and development. One can, however,
certainly ensure that the magnitude of its after-effects was within human ability to deal
with. Unfortunately the Pakistani government is poorly equipped to deal with the human
aftermath. This is where all of us as individuals can play a role. We still have the time to
help the flood-affected people, and assist them to rebuild their lives.