Climate Crisis or Government Negligence?
Lutif Ali Halo
It has been a long time since we started hearing about the climate crisis, climate change, adapting to a changing climate, and attempts to mitigate climate change and its effects on a national and global scale. Many saw it as a danger for the future, not something to be worried about right now. Many had never heard of the capitalistic face-saving mantra of ‘adaptation to climate change’ or ‘climate mitigation, etc. By many, I mean the people of Sindh. The fact is, however, that the people of Sindh have been living through climate change for some considerable time. There has been acute water scarcity in almost the entire province, often in the months from March to July. Some might have forgotten that the Sindh Chamber of Agriculture (SCA) had urged the government to declare the province ‘calamity-hit’ last year in May. More than 60 percent of the water shortage was recorded in the barrages of Sindh. People came out to protest in every district of Sindh. At that time, it was impractical to foretell that more than 16 districts of Sindh would be inundated in August of the same year.
The people of Dadu, the home district of the chief minister of Sindh, Murad Ali Shah, had been displaced for more than eight months, even after floods, as their homes and farmlands were submerged. Torrential rains and flash floods had wreaked havoc in different parts of the district. Rains in the Nara mountains of Khairpur brought flash floods to Taluka Kot Diji of Khairpur, inundating many villages and badly damaging fruits and cotton crops. In August, flash floods and riverine floods lashed districts in the lower part of Sindh. Many parts of Badin, Umerkot, Mirpurkhas, Sanghar, Thatta, and Sujawal were heavily hit by the floods.
Around 728 people, including 313 children and 134 women, died; 12.5 million were rendered homeless; more than 8.3 million acres of standing crops had been destroyed; 896,084 houses had been damaged; and 2328 kilometres of roads and infrastructure had collapsed and vanished. Moreover, 15,435 animals perished in the province last year. The Karachi-Larkana Indus Highway was shut down for around three weeks. As in the last year and in the years to come, the people of Sindh will experience climate change with great force.
During such a catastrophe, the government of Sindh was sleeping like a log. Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah and the local ministers were seen nowhere. Government efforts for relief and rescue could not be traced. The province’s chief executive had a frivolous attitude when he callously told mediapersons that "the embankments of our rivers are in better condition than the flood situation of 2010 and 2011." However, Khairpur Nathan Shah was flooded after four to five breaches in the Flood Protective (FP) embankment that followed breaches in Suprio and the MNV drain that had drowned the city back in the 2010 floods. It is still questionable in what manner such a non-serious CM could provide substantial rescue, relief, and rehabilitation operations to the people of Sindh if the situation gets worse this year.
While the government was missing from the scene, many individuals, local NGOs, and socio-political organisations, to name but a few, the Workers’ Resistance Movement and the Sindh Disaster Relief Campaign, took the burden on their shoulders to provide relief to the flood affected. Young activists were running donation campaigns and relief drives without any support from the sleeping government. Nonetheless, rebuilding houses, roads, and infrastructure was not the task of individuals. The sleeping provincial and federal governments had to wake up and play their roles, but for them, people only matter for voting.
An awry and ineffective government should have felt the shame and come forward with an appropriate plan to rehabilitate all the flood victims and reconstruct proper infrastructure that could save the people from the already predicted floods. The government of Sindh should have come into contact with experts for an assessment of destruction and rehabilitation costs. Sindh faced losses in the billions of dollars. The ruling parties in the province and those in the capital must formulate and execute a strategy from district to UC level to deal with the extremes of climate events in the days to come. International organisations must also come forward to rehabilitate not only the people of Sindh but also those affected in Balochistan, Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Gilgit-Baltistan. The current anti-climate and anti-people decisions of the federal and provincial governments to extract mineral resources will only make the situation worse. Climate change is a fact of the day and is here at our doorsteps, but after such a calamity and loss as experienced last year, if necessary steps are not taken for the future, the governments will only be as responsible as they were last year.
