Islamabad:
The Senate Standing Committee on Water Resources on Wednesday expressed serious concern over the rising death toll from Monsun floods, accused unplanned construction and poor water management to aggravate the crisis.
Chairman of Senator Sherry Rehman criticized the committee’s lack of planning in the building of housing communities on natural water channels and noticed the recent flood in Islamabad’s Saidpur village and drowning of a man and his daughter.
During the meeting, officials in Rehman Water resources grilled over their failure to supply data on pipe wells, availability of groundwater and national water consumption. She questioned how the ministry could not map groundwater extraction or even estimate the number of pipe wells in the country.
Between June 26 and July 22, 242 people lost their lives, and nearly 600 were injured in flood -related incidents, Rehman told the committee, adding that 21 of these deaths took place in the last 24 hours alone.
“This is not an occasional disaster-it is a continuous fall of climate change. Pakistan is the most climate-cozy country in the world,” she said. “To call these events natural disasters owe the blame from human negligence.”
She called the destruction ‘man -made’, stemmed from poor planning, unregulated construction on waterways and lack of trade on climate alerts. The chairman expressed an alarm over the lack of an early warning system and the absence of rainwater storage in national development plans.
Rehman emphasized that the provincial and district administrations improve flooding systems and regulate groundwater. She also demanded that the housing regulation bodies present a report on the recent drowning event in a private housing community.
The President also expressed concern about the deteriorating water crisis in Balochistan and Chitral, where land becomes barren after each monsoon. She called for updated plans for groundwater charging and pipe well control in the next session.
When he talked to journalists after the meeting, Rehman said that Sindh and Punjab also ran out of groundwater. “Our neighbors, Afghanistan and Iran, are facing an emergency in the 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 waterways and quoted Saidpur Village in Islamabad and DHA Rawalpindi as examples where not -planned development directly contributed to destruction and loss of life. “We can’t call this a natural disaster anymore. These are human induced disasters, driven by poor planning and climate association,” she emphasized.
Search operations, she added, is still in the process of a father and daughter swept away in DHA Rawalpindi. She also recommended to limit tourism in Emergency-Hit Gilgit-Baltistan.
A significant part of the meeting focused on the country’s dwindling groundwater resources. Officials admitted that no ministry had a complete map or data on groundwater extraction or surface water consumption. Senator Rehman called the absence of data and planned a “completely fragmented and inadequate response”, especially in a country declared “water button” by the United Nations this year.
