Islamabad:
On Wednesday, the Senate’s Standing Committee on Water Resources expressed concerns about the increase in death deadlines for monsoon floods, blaming unforeseen construction and water mismanagement for aggravating the crisis.
Predictive by senator Sherry Rehman, the committee criticized the lack of planning in the construction of housing companies on natural water canals and noticed the recent flood in the village of Saidpur d’Islamabad and the drowning of a man and his daughter.
During the meeting, Rehman has toasted those responsible for the Ministry of Water Resources on their inability to provide data on tube wells, groundwater and national water use. She asked how the ministry could not map the extraction of groundwater 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 incidents related to floods, Rehman told the Committee, adding that 21 of these deaths had taken place in the past 24 hours.
“It is not an occasional disaster-it is a continuous fallout in climate change. Pakistan is the country most vulnerable to the climate in the world,” she said. “Calling these incidents for natural disasters puts the blame on human negligence.”
It called “artificial” destruction, resulting from poor planning, unregulated construction on the sailors and non-acting on climate warnings. The president expressed his alarm in the absence of an early alert system and the lack of storage of rainwater in national development plans.
Rehman stressed that provincial and district administrations improve flood alert systems and regulate groundwater. She also demanded that housing regulatory organizations submit a report on the recent drowning incident in a private housing company.
The chair also expressed its concern concerning the worsening of the water crisis in Balutchistan and Chitral, where land becomes sterile after each monsoon. She called for updated plans on the recharge of groundwater and the regulation of the tube well during the next session.
Speaking to journalists after the meeting, Rehman said that Sindh and Punjab also lacked groundwater. “Our neighbors, Afghanistan and Iran are faced with an emergency of water. The Modi government threatens to block our water, she said, adding that” we must be prepared “.
The senator criticized the uncontrolled construction of natural navigable waterways, citing the village of Saidpur in Islamabad and Dha Rawalpindi as examples where unforeseen development has directly contributed to destruction and loss of life. “We can no longer call this a natural disaster. These are human-induced disasters, motivated by poor planning and climate inaction,” she said.
Research operations, she added, are still underway for a father and a daughter carried to Dha Rawalpindi. She also recommended to restrict tourism in the Gilgit-Baltistan in an emergency.
A significant part of the meeting focused on the decrease in the country’s groundwater resources. Officials admitted that no ministry had a complete card or data on the extraction of groundwater or surface water consumption. Senator Rehman described the absence of data and plan a “completely fragmented and inadequate response”, in particular in a declared country “to the rare” by the United Nations this year.
