The Inundation of Justice: A Requiem for Punjab’s Floodplains

There is a particular grief that belongs to disasters that did not have to happen, and it is this grief that Punjab carries into the monsoon season of 2025. Over 1.3 million acres of farmland disappeared beneath brown water. Nearly 4.2 million people were displaced from homes that, in many cases, had stood for generations. More than 161,700 houses were damaged or destroyed. Rs. 430 billion or more in agricultural losses were recorded in a single season — sixty percent of the rice crop gone, more than a third of the cotton, nearly a third of the sugarcane, vanished into water that should never have reached where it reached. We write this not to the officials who have already explained this away in press conferences, but to the United Nations and to UNDP, because the people of Punjab’s floodplains have run out of patience with their own institutions, and are now asking the world to simply witness what has been done to them.

This was not an act of God that arrived without warning. Pakistan has known, on paper, exactly where its rivers intend to go when they swell. The Punjab Flood Plain Regulation Act of 2016 exists precisely for this purpose — to classify the land along the Ravi, the Chenab, the Jhelum, the Sutlej, and the Beas into high-, medium-, and low-risk zones, and to forbid construction where the river has always, eventually, come to reclaim its space. Nearly 1,990 zones across Punjab’s five major rivers were identified as high-risk. The law was not secret. The maps existed. And yet, year after year, private housing societies rose directly inside the floodplains of the Sutlej, the Ravi, and the Chenab, with roads and embankments and concrete blocks that did not merely ignore the river’s ancient path — they physically blocked it, diverting its natural drainage until the water had nowhere left to go but into homes, into fields, into the lives of people who had trusted that someone, somewhere in government, was watching the river on their behalf.

Nobody was watching. That is the plain, devastating truth this catastrophe reveals, and it is a truth with an address. The floodplains of the Ravi and the Sutlej fall squarely within the responsibility of the Punjab Irrigation Department, and for nearly the entire period between August 2018 and April 2022 — the years in which encroachment into these very floodplains accelerated most sharply — that department was led by a single minister in the PTI government of Chief Minister Usman Buzdar. It is widely understood in Punjab’s political circles that the Irrigation portfolio is among the most sought-after in any provincial cabinet, prized for the scale of contracts, water allocations, and development funds that flow through it — which is precisely why the choice to hold onto this particular ministry throughout an entire tenure is remembered so bitterly now. River zoning, demarcation, and the removal of encroachments in the riverbeds were not peripheral duties of that office. They were its core mandate. No meaningful reform of floodplain enforcement, riverbed encroachment removal, or zoning implementation was carried out during those four years. When the monsoon finally arrived in its full and terrible force in 2025, it did not find a floodplain that had been protected in the intervening years. It found housing schemes, blocked drainage, and embankments built for private profit sitting exactly where the warnings said they should not be.

There is a particular bitterness that residents of the Ravi and Sutlej basins carry today, and it deserves to be spoken aloud rather than buried in technical reports. In December 2018 — in the very same window when Punjab’s floodplains were being left undefended — the Indian Union Cabinet under Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved the revival of the long-stalled Shahpurkandi Dam project on the river Ravi, a project explicitly designed to capture water that had, for decades, continued flowing downstream into Pakistan. This was a significant development for the custodianship of a river Pakistan depends on, and it occurred while the minister responsible for that very river’s floodplain sat in office on the Pakistani side. Whatever the technical merits or treaty implications of that Indian project, the silence from the minister of Irrigation at the time is now remembered, rightly or wrongly, as part of a broader pattern: attention was not on the river, upstream or downstream, when it needed to be.

What makes this tragedy harder to bear is not merely the scale of the loss — though $2 billion and more in damage is a number large enough to bend a provincial economy — but the near-total absence of accountability that followed it. Despite losses of this magnitude, despite nearly 4.2 million people displaced, despite the total failure to demarcate and defend two of Punjab’s most significant floodplains over a four-year tenure, not a single case has been registered against the minister who held responsibility for that department throughout almost the entire period in question. No inquiry. No forensic audit of why zoning maps were never enforced. No reckoning at all. And yet the political figures associated with that period continue to hold public platforms, continue to be interviewed, and — most painfully for the flood survivors who watch this unfold — that same minister speaks with apparent confidence about Pakistan’s water security while remaining silent in his tenure. For the farmers of the Ravi and Sutlej basins who lost everything, watching this is its own second injury: to be told, implicitly, that the very language of water stewardship now belongs to people whose stewardship they blame for their ruin.

This is the appeal we make to the international community, and to the United Nations and UNDP specifically, and it is a demand, not merely a lament: open a formal, independent inquiry into the administration of the Ravi and Sutlej floodplains between 2018 and 2022, examine why statutory zoning and encroachment-removal duties went unperformed for four consecutive years, and determine — through due legal process, not through the court of public opinion — whether the minister who held that office should face negligence proceedings and be made to answer for losses inflicted on the public purse. Pakistan does not lack laws. It has a Flood Plain Regulation Act, a Rivers Protection Ordinance, provincial disaster management authorities, and now, in the aftermath of 2025, demolition crews from RUDA and PDMA are tearing down the very structures that should never have been permitted to rise. What Pakistan lacks is the institutional courage to open that inquiry against the corrupt elite, to follow it wherever the evidence leads, and to hold whoever is found responsible — including, if the facts warrant it, the minister who led that department — to account, before the next monsoon arrives and finds the same unprotected floodplains waiting.

We ask the United Nations and UNDP to see this not as a natural disaster story, but as a governance story — one in which nature simply did what it always does, and it was a four-year silence, still unexamined by any formal inquiry, that turned a monsoon into a catastrophe.

Please add that the Ministry of Irrigation is the most lucrative, and the minister took it by his own choice from the top leadership of PTI, using the art of gab, which is the only matter in Pakistan.