By Tuesday afternoon, the waters of Nullah Lai had begun to recede, and the familiar script was already being rehearsed. A “record” downpour had battered the twin cities. Schools were shuttered. The Army had been deployed to Rawalpindi. Three people were dead. And climate change was summoned, once again, to sit in the dock.
What submerged Raja Bazaar, Ganjmandi, Sadiqabad, E-11, and Ghauri Town was a metropolitan order that spent two generations turning natural waterways into real estate plots. Shamsabad recorded 201 millimetres, New Kattarian nearly 187, and E-11 roughly 150 in a sudden deluge. Lai crested at 29 feet at Kattarian and over 20 feet at Gawalmandi. Those numbers describe an extreme weather event; they do not explain why a natural drainage channel in E-11 that once commanded a 100-foot right-of-way has been squeezed to eighteen feet. They do not explain why a stream flowing from D-12 was narrowed from forty feet to eighteen, with the Capital Development Authority’s explicit permission to concrete it over. They do not explain the concrete slabs cast over the storm drains of Ghauri Town, nor why the low-lying basin that Constantinos Doxiadis reserved for a lake at Lohi Bher is now occupied by private housing schemes that the CDA never bothered to acquire. That explanation is not meteorological. It is administrative.
Islamabad and Rawalpindi are treated administratively as two distinct cities. Hydrologically, they are indivisible. Lai originates in the Margalla foothills and drains a catchment of roughly 235 square kilometres, the vast majority of which lies within the federal capital, before discharging its volume within hours into Rawalpindi and the Soan River. Every time Islamabad paves over a ravine, plots out a natural depression, or opens a dam spillway, Rawalpindi receives the invoice. A vulnerability assessment pegged Rawalpindi’s flood index at 0.47, compared with Islamabad’s 0.24. The rain does not prefer the garrison city. Gravity does.
This reality was understood when the capital was originally planned. The 1960 master plan superimposed an urban grid onto an existing ecological framework: natural seasonal streams were designated to cross sectors undisturbed on their descent to the Soan, and nearly half the metropolitan expanse was zoned to remain green or agricultural. The master plan stipulated a mandatory review every twenty years. That review never took place. What did get revised, in the 1990s, was Zone 4, which was unlocked from a protected green belt and turned into an open frontier for private housing developments. That single stroke of a pen converted critical drainage and infiltration land into commercial inventory.
Conflating the climate multiplier with the root cause is merely how institutional culpability is laundered.
Islamabad’s built-up footprint expanded from roughly 2,700 hectares in 1990 to more than 18,000 hectares by 2020. Forests and porous farmland surrendered to roofs, asphalt, and boundary walls. Modelling suggests that uncontrolled sprawl of this magnitude will expand high-risk flood zones by roughly 41 percent by 2030. A catchment that once absorbed runoff now flings it into storm drains that have been systematically constricted to accommodate the very homes that the water inevitably invades.
None of this is a recent revelation. On 23 July 2001, the basin absorbed 620 millimetres of rain in ten hours. Seventy-four people drowned, and thousands of homes were decimated. The subsequent Japanese study concluded unequivocally that downstream conveyance had been strangled by illegal construction in the floodplains and unmanaged solid waste in the riverbed. More than two decades later, the United Nations and the National Disaster Management Authority arrived at the exact same diagnosis. Early-warning sirens were installed and continue to function today, but the land-use lessons were never codified into law.
After every catastrophe, the state reflexively announces engineering palliatives: check dams along the Margalla slopes, an auxiliary channel in E-11, and underground retention tanks in the lowest wards. These measures are not inherently flawed; they are simply insufficient. Constructing a check dam upstream of an illegally narrowed, covered drain is a monument to bureaucratic incoherence. Civil works that leave land-grabbing and reckless plotting untouched are not climate resilience. They are seasonal theatre.
Climate breakdown undoubtedly plays a role, but not the exculpatory one officials assign to it. Global warming made the 2022 super-floods more catastrophic, and sudden, high-intensity convective storms will continue to strike urban centres. But warming did not approve an illegal layout plan, regularise an unpermitted housing society, permit a natural stream to be capped with concrete, or release Rawal Dam’s spillways without regard for the cresting gauge at Lai. Conflating the climate multiplier with the root cause is merely how institutional culpability is laundered.
The political economy behind this ruin is far simpler than the hydrology. In Pakistani urban centres, a subdivided plot remains the most lucrative commodity that can be extracted from the earth. Encroachment is routinely framed as an offence committed solely by the impoverished along Lai’s embankments. In truth, the major offenders are commercial plazas, luxury restaurants, perimeter walls of mega-housing developments, and sprawling government compounds. State enforcement invariably demolishes the makeshift dwellings of the vulnerable while leaving elite concrete undisturbed. A flood policy incapable of confronting well-connected developers will never protect a working-class lane in Gawalmandi.
The road network completes the crisis. Sunken underpasses and sealed urban arteries manufacture artificial flood basins even where natural nullahs have never been encroached upon. Diverting stormwater away from ceremonial VIP corridors and discharging it into neighbouring informal settlements merely redistributes disaster from the planned city to the unplanned one. Meanwhile, Rawalpindi’s formal sewerage network covers barely a third of its municipal limits. In the remainder, domestic sewage already fills the storm drains to capacity. When the monsoon breaks, the same silted conduits are expected to evacuate both. The torrent that enters living rooms is not just deep; it is toxic.
The twin cities require a unified, cross-jurisdictional basin authority armed with the statutory power to veto any layout plan that elevates peak flood levels downstream at Gawalmandi. They need an open-access hydrological model governing all municipal approvals, storm channels restored to their natural volumetric capacities, an uncompromising freeze on all construction within Lai’s riparian buffer, and dam spillway protocols strictly synchronised with river gauges. Official press conferences must cease offering rainfall statistics as an alibi and instead account for which drains were covered and which approvals were signed.
Islamabad was envisioned as a modern, planned capital that would insulate the historic city below. Over six decades later, the planned city floods its own sectors because it paved over the ecological grid that sustained it, and it inundates Rawalpindi because water still obeys gravity. The rain posed a direct question that urban planners have dodged for decades. It will ask it again next monsoon. The answer will not be found in the sky.