ISLAMABAD:
The Senate Standing Committee on Water Resources on Wednesday expressed serious concern over the rising death toll from monsoon floods, blaming unplanned construction and poor water management for worsening the crisis.
Chaired by Senator Sherry Rehman, the committee criticised the lack of planning in building housing societies on natural water channels and took notice of the recent flood in Islamabad’s Saidpur village, and the drowning of a man and his daughter.
During the meeting, Rehman grilled Water Resources Ministry officials over their failure to provide data on tube wells, groundwater availability, and national water usage. She questioned how the ministry could not map groundwater extraction or even estimate the number of tube wells in the country.
Between June 26 and July 22, 242 people lost their lives and nearly 600 were injured in flood-related incidents, Rehman told the committee, adding that 21 of those deaths occurred in the past 24 hours alone.
“This is not an occasional disasterit’s a continuous fallout of climate change. Pakistan is the most climate-vulnerable country in the world,” she said. “Calling these incidents natural disasters shifts the blame from human negligence.”
She called the destruction ‘man-made’, stemming from poor planning, unregulated construction on waterways, and failure to act on climate warnings. The chair expressed alarm over the lack of an early warning system and the absence of rainwater storage in national development plans.
Rehman stressed that the provincial and district administrations improve flood warning systems and regulate groundwater. She also demanded that housing regulatory bodies submit a report on the recent drowning incident in a private housing society.
The chair also voiced concern over the worsening water crisis in Balochistan and Chitral, where land is turning barren after each monsoon. She called for updated plans on groundwater recharge and tube well regulation at the next session.
Talking to reporters after the meeting, Rehman said Sindh and Punjab were also running out of groundwater. “Our neighbours, Afghanistan and Iran, are facing a water emergency. The Modi government threatens to block our water, she said, adding that “we must be prepared.”
The Senator criticized the unchecked construction on natural waterways, citing Saidpur Village in Islamabad and DHA Rawalpindi as examples where unplanned development directly contributed to the destruction and loss of lives. “We cannot call this a natural disaster anymore. These are human-induced disasters, driven by poor planning and climate inaction,” she emphasized.
Search operations, she added, are still ongoing for a father and daughter swept away in DHA Rawalpindi. She also recommended restricting tourism in emergency-hit Gilgit-Baltistan.
A significant part of the meeting focused on the country’s dwindling groundwater resources. Officials admitted that no ministry had a complete map or data on groundwater extraction or surface water consumption. Senator Rehman called the absence of data and planning a “totally fragmented and inadequate response,” particularly in a country declared “water scarce” by the United Nations this year.
