Monsoon chaos

While the Sindh government has announced an emergency in Sindh in anticipation of another spell of monsoon rains, one must wonder what the objective of declaring an emergency in this case is. Is it a promise that Sindh will not see the kind of chaos witnesses in the last few weeks or is it a way of waving the white flag in the face of the might of Mother Nature? Those who went through the heavy flooding and power outages in Karachi will fear that the answer is the latter option. With the rain system formed in the Bay of Bengal starting to move west, the southern part of Sindh, including Karachi, will be hit by heavy rain from Friday night to Monday noon. Experts have warned that two to three days of rain would be enough to cause urban flooding in Karachi, Thatta and Hyderabad. It is quite possible that the residents of these cities go through Eid amidst floods and power outages. It is at such moments that the complete helplessness of the state infrastructure becomes exposed.

This is not for want of trying. The Sindh government has effectively cancelled Eid for its employees in anticipation of floods. If the instructions are followed, state officials will be on the flooded streets trying to mitigate the disaster. The problem lies less in what happens on the day of the rains. It is the entire framework of urban development across Pakistan that needs to be looked at. Urban spaces are designed without adequate man-made drainage, while natural drainage options are tramped over by concrete buildings. Given Karachi’s position next to the Arabian Sea, one could easily think that the city could be designed to allow all rain water to flow into the sea. Urban flooding has only one solution: drainage. This requires well-designed work on an emergency footing before the monsoons arrive, rather than a scramble during flooding. Appropriate drainage, however, would not be enough to fix the disaster that Karachi Electric is during the rain. In a situation where the electricity transmission grid is so poor that light rain can shut it down for hours, what can be expected in heavy rainfall? One would have thought that the grid would have been improved under private management, but it seems to have gotten worse with even less accountability to public needs. Fixing the electricity grid to prepare it for heavy rainfall is required, but this is a task that requires the government to play a significant regulatory role. Tragically, there are no short-term solutions on offer. One can only hope that the rains are forgiving.