On 30 July 2026, Federal Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal announced that the National Flood Protection Plan would be placed before the Council of Common Interests. The cost now stands at Rs 700 billion. The same plan was approved by the CCI in 2017 at roughly half that sum. The minister acknowledged that the previous governments had left it unimplemented and that the 2022 floods had made a revision unavoidable. Nearly a decade after the plan was first prepared, the country is back at the same point, only Rs 360 billion deeper in the same failure.
Yet Pakistan already possesses the legal instruments this plan claims to address. In 2016, the Punjab Assembly passed the Floodplain Regulation Act, designating flood-prone zones and criminalizing construction without written permission. In 2023, the Punjab Irrigation Act—which I shepherded as Irrigation Minister—mandated strict embankment standards, River Ledgers of vulnerabilities, and binding impact simulations before any river training work. The frameworks exist. What does not exist is the will to enforce them.
The observation is accurate. The amnesia is deliberate. We have tried this four times since 1978. Four plans. Four decades. Four times we approved the paperwork, ignored the embankments, and watched the water take our people. The Federal Flood Commission, established in 1977 after the devastating floods of 1973 and 1976, executed NFPP-I from 1978 to 1988, NFPP-II from 1988 to 1998, and NFPP-III from 1998 to 2008. NFPP-IV was originally drafted in 2006, then revised after the catastrophic 2010 floods. Approved at Rs 340 billion in 2017, it remains unimplemented nine years later. Now the bill has grown by Rs 360 billion, and we are back where we started.
But there is a problem with the numbers, and it is not a small one. In November 2025, Secretary Water Resources Syed Ali Murtaza testified before the Senate that this plan comprised 375 schemes costing over Rs 824 billion, with the provinces supposed to pay nearly Rs 747 billion. He told the committee that the provinces had refused to contribute. Eight months later, the same plan is being presented at Rs 700 billion with a neat 50-50 federal-provincial split. The total has been trimmed by roughly Rs 124 billion, and the provinces' burden has been halved. A plan that shrinks by fifteen percent and flips its cost-sharing formula in eight months is not rigorously costed. It is still being negotiated politically, not finalized technically.
After the 2022 floods, international donors pledged $11 billion for reconstruction. Three years later, Pakistan had utilized less than $3 billion. Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb admitted that Pakistan failed to prepare a single credible, bankable project to access the funds. The money sat in vaults while the people sat in mud. It reminds me of a personal experience, In 1994, I went for Hajj. The government issued travellers' cheques to pilgrims, many of them illiterate rural folk. They wandered through Makkah and Madina holding instruments worth thousands of rupees not knowing what to do with them. Three decades later, Pakistan stands in the same posture, clutching billions in pledged aid but lacking the competence to convert promise into protection.
So when the government now asks for Rs 700 billion, the question is not whether we need the plan. We do. The question is whether we have earned the right to spend it, or are simply paying compound interest on forty-eight years of negligence. The Acts of 2016 gave the state the power to declare zones off-limits, mandated annual surveys, and criminalized unauthorized building. Section 20 gave it overriding effect over all other laws. It was a good, careful law. And for ten years, we ignored it.
The 2023 Punjab Irrigation Act is equally clear. Section 88 forbids embankment construction without physical or numerical modeling. On paper, the framework is world-class. In practice, floodplain maps remain unnotified, committees rarely meet, and influential landowners block river plains with impunity.
This is not ignorance. It is a habit. After the 2010 floods, Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah's judicial commission identified systemic failures and named senior irrigation officials responsible for the chaos, recommending criminal charges. Those officials were reportedly later promoted instead of punished. Fifteen years later, the 2025 floods replayed the exact same script. The same villages flooded. The same people suffered. Officials expressed shock at predictable disasters.
Why does this persist? Because announcing a plan is politically profitable; implementing it is politically costly. Announcements look good on camera, satisfy donors, and generate news. Implementation requires confronting powerful mafias, firing incompetent officials, and spending political capital on embankments that win no votes.
When the cloudbursts struck Buner in August 2025, multiple families were swept away near the river; one family alone lost ten members, with others still missing. The NDMA red alert that morning warned of flash floods across upper Pakistan but named no villages to evacuate, no time to move, and no route to safety. A red alert that names a province but not a village is not a warning. It is a weather report. And weather reports do not carry children to higher ground.
These are not statistics. They are broken lives, and much of the devastation was preventable.
The human cost is measured in lives, not spreadsheets. In Jalapur near Multan, Rukhsana Bibi watched the Sawan rains of 2026 turn her two-room mud house back into mire again. She had rebuilt twice since 2022, each time on the same slope, because no one told her where the flood line ran. In Dera Ghazi Khan, a young man named Imran sowed cotton on five acres after leveling the field and installing a solar tube well. The hill torrent that came down the Sulaiman Range buried the field under boulders and mud. These are not statistics. They are broken lives, and much of the devastation was preventable.
What would it take to believe this time will be different? Not another plan. Not another CCI meeting.
First, name the officer. Publish the 2026 Infrastructure Audit results. If an embankment breaches, the official who signed off on it should face criminal negligence charges, not a sideways transfer. After the 2010 floods, Justice Mansoor Ali Shah's commission recommended criminal cases against senior officials. According to press reports of the time, they were promoted instead. That must not happen again.
Second, activate the Federal Flood Commission. It has existed since 1977 with a mandate to prepare national plans, standardize designs, and monitor implementation. Yet it has been reduced to a filing cabinet. Give it binding authority during the monsoon to link early warnings directly to district evacuations and barrage operations. Make one chairman responsible for the entire chain of command.
Third, tie money to the weather. When forecasters warn of a high-intensity monsoon, funds should flow automatically to the provinces for pre-positioned resources. No cabinet delays. No committee approvals. The NDMA warned in November 2025 that the 2026 monsoon would bring 22 to 26 percent above-normal rainfall. By May, Chairman Lt Gen Inam Haider Malik was briefing the Emergency Response Committee. The warnings were not classified. They were delivered to television studios across the country. And still, on July 30, as the Sawan rains continue and Bhadoon approaches, we are told that a Rs 700 billion plan is about to be placed before the CCI.
The arithmetic of delay is unforgiving. Every year that passes without execution adds roughly Rs 40 billion to the bill. Every monsoon that arrives without certified embankments adds names to a list that already numbers in the thousands. The Sawan of 2026 has done its work. The soil is saturated. The reservoirs are high. The late-monsoon depressions are forming over the Bay of Bengal, and they will come, as they always come. Until we change, Rs 700 billion is not a flood protection plan. It is a financial forecast of the cost of continuing to do nothing.
Facta non verba. Deeds, not words.