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akistan is a land carved by rivers, yet today it faces severe drinking water shortages. The waters that once sustained civilisations along the Indus now tell a tale of neglect, corruption and betrayal.
River floods are not a novel challenge. For over five thousand years, the rivers of the Indus Basin have swelled and receded. In the age of satellite imagery and armed with scientific advance, the state should not appear so helpless.
The Federal Flood Commission and Irrigation Departments, tasked with protection, have failed year after year. When the waters rise houses collapse, fields vanish and lives are lost, not always because the challenge is unprecedented but because of poor governance. Flood losses are not mere natural disasters; they also reflect our institutional failures.
Look at Rawal Dam. The lake that once supplied drinking water to Rawalpindi city and cantonment, has been reduced to a monumental disaster.
During the British Raj, the forests that form the lake’s watershed were protected. The authorities realised that clean water begins with healthy forests. The waters feeding the Northern Command Headquarters, today’s GHQ in Rawalpindi, were safeguarded with vigilance. The forest canopy shielded the soil and sustained the flow.
Today, the guardianship has been replaced by greed. Banigala, once a green forest, has been turned into a cluster of villas for the elite. Politicians, bureaucrats and influential elite have built homes on the very edge of Rawal Lake, delighting in the view of its shimmering surface and quietly discharging their sewage into it.
The cancer has spread further. The slums of Barakahu and Bari Imam have swelled uncontrollably, pouring their untreated filth into the lake. Civic authorities, sworn to protect it, have chosen instead to profit from its neglect. Above in Murree, where the Korang River descends to feed Rawal Lake, a local politician has built a thirteen-story hotel.
In 2000, Justice Nasir Aslam Zahid of the Supreme Court, ordered its demolition. The politician responded by permitting hundreds of buildings to be built around it so that Murree’s green slopes became a skyline of concrete greed.
On June 12, 2003, a tehsil naib nazim wrote to the Punjab government, pleading for intervention and warning that the watershed was being destroyed. His warning has had no effect. The illegal hotels still stand, their shadows stretching down toward Rawal Lake, where the water is growing darker, thicker and more polluted each year.
Periodic high-resolution satellite imagery tells the truth. It shows the steady stripping of forest cover, the creeping scars of unplanned construction, the erosion of green into grey. The images record with cold clarity the saga of a watershed polluted beyond recognition, suffocating beneath the weight of human greed.
If Rawal Lake, which sits right next to the heart of power and supplies drinking water to the garrison city, cannot be saved what hope can there be for the remote corners of Pakistan? If a reservoir a stone’s throw from the Parliament House is left to rot, how can Sindh’s villages, Balochistan’s deserts, or Punjab’s farmlands expect better protection? If the guardians of the nation cannot protect water in their own backyard, what care will they ever extend to the thirsty in Gwadar?
The Federal Flood Commission and Irrigation Departments, tasked with protection, fail year after year. When the waters rise, houses collapse, fields vanish and lives are lost.
Science has long whispered solutions, but Pakistan has not listened. Watershed forests have a critical role in providing high-quality drinking water. Protected forests reduce sediment, filter pollutants and regulate river flows. Where forests stand, rivers run clear; where forests fall, rivers turn to poison. Erosion control keeps soil in place. Natural filtration absorbs the waste from agriculture. Montane cloud forests, in particular, increase water yield and sustain dry-season flows. Every tree cut is a death sentence for a stream; every illegal hotel a wound to a river.
Some other nations have chosen differently. In Kenya, Nairobi protects its water supply by preserving the Aberdares National Park, ensuring that the city’s water supply is clean and steady. In South Africa, Cape Town defends its future by safeguarding the Cape Peninsula and Hottentots Holland catchments, recogniaing that no filtration plant can rival the work of a forest. In India, Mumbai relies on lakes cradled within Sanjay Gandhi National Park, where green slopes keep the water clear and the people safe. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, Rawal Dam, once a reservoir of promise, has been reduced to a basin of contamination. It supplies twenty-eight million gallons daily to Rawalpindi, but the city needs sixty. The Water and Sanitation Agency provides fifty-four million gallons from all sources combined, leaving a shortfall of six. The supply reaches sixty-one union councils, but the flow is often erratic and polluted.
A city that houses the army headquarters drinks from a poisoned chalice. What does that say for the villages downstream, where women walk for miles to fetch muddied water?
This is worse than what is generally called a governance failure. It is betrayal: the abandonment alike of people and land. Where once forests stood watch over rivers, concrete monsters suffocate them today. Where laws once offered protection, they are mocked today by the powerful. Where rivers once sustained life, today they bring death, flooding villages at times and running dry at others.
This tragedy need not have happened. Other nations, poorer than Pakistan, have shown that protecting forests, enforcing laws and respecting ecosystems costs less than filtration plants. But Pakistan, intoxicated by profit and privilege, has chosen blindness. The cries of Gwadar’s thirsty children, the drowned fields of Sindh, the contamination of Rawalpindi’s piped water supply are not separate stories. They are verses from the same dirge. With every tree felled in the watershed, another line is added to the mournful poem.
Unless we heed the lessons of Rawal Dam, the rivers that once birthed our civilisation will destroy it. No amount of borrowed money can overcome the corruption. Pakistan needs honest bureaucrats, competent engineers and skilled water managers—people who acknowledge that water is not a commodity to be sold, but a lifeline to be safeguarded.
Dr Ikramul Haq, writer and Advocate Supreme Court, is an adjunct teacher at Lahore University of Management Sciences.
Engineer Arshad H Abbasi is co-founder of Energy Excellence Centres at NUST and UET, Peshawar.