In Sahiwal, Punjab, one morning, a woman stood on the outskirts of her field, her finger pointing to the grey horizon. She didn't make a gesture towards the mountains. She was pointing at the smoke. It was a mere few kilometres from where she had been working as a farmer for three decades, growing cotton and wheat. It was there that the Sahiwal Coal Power Plant, one of the key projects in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, was built.
During my field research in 2019, she told me, "The sky was different before; all the birds had changed their patterns." This was not just a complaint from Safia; it was an exact ecological reading, the kind that communities embody before scientists get there with their instruments.
Over the past years, I have been doing research on industrial development, cultural heritage, and community life in Punjab and Sindh. But it's not just an environmental crisis — it's a heritage emergency, with an impact that's happening so subtly, so slowly, that it won't make the news. Yet, it will change the identity of millions of people forever.
In the middle sit two of the most marvellous gifts that man could have given to the world: the ancient cities of the Indus Civilisation, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, now amid coal emissions and catastrophic floods.
The findings of the research conducted in the area surrounding the Sahiwal plant show that groundwater depletion, carbon dioxide emissions, and heavy metal pollution (including lead, copper, and iron) have been measured, with measurable increases occurring within a 0–40 km radius around the plant.
From 2018 to 2021, health surveys reveal increasing rates of respiratory disease, skin disease, and eye irritation among local communities living closest to the plant. These are not numbers in the abstract. They are the lives lived by people who were never listened to — the farmers, the women, the children — who had no voice in the formulation of policies, and who are never heard to voice their opinions.
“Justice flourishes within frameworks of care, generosity, and a heart-centred approach. These acts of kindness and care are radical within the colonial frameworks that inform and maintain archaeological practice in most of the world today.” — Professor Uzma Z. Rizvi, “Archaeology as Radical Care,” Forum Kritische Archäologie, 2023
These words, written by Professor Uzma Z. Rizvi of Pratt Institute — one of the foremost scholars of South Asian heritage and decolonial archaeology — capture precisely what is absent from Pakistan’s policy framework on heritage protection.
Local communities living near Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, and other threatened sites must be formally recognised as heritage stewards — with legal standing, financial support, and decision-making power over the landscapes they have inhabited for centuries
Harappan sites like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro have been built on a kind of extraction: extract the prestige of UNESCO World Heritage status, extract the tourism revenue when visitors arrive, extract the academic publications when scholars excavate.
But the communities living around these sites — the farmers, the women, the daily-wage labourers — are rarely named as custodians. They are, in the language of official policy, bystanders to their own history.
The floods of 2022 made the crisis impossible to ignore. Record monsoon rains caused severe damage to Mohenjo-daro’s protective mud-plaster layers, exposing original 4,500-year-old walls to accelerated erosion.
Climate scientists say that these events will only worsen. However, the amount allocated to the heritage fund remains small compared with UNESCO’s suggested minimum for site preservation in Pakistan.
In the meantime, 30-year forward-looking air quality forecasts for industrial areas of Sindh and Punjab predict sulphur dioxide levels exceeding standards for up to 100,000 people, as well as mercury deposition on crops, which will impact the food chain for generations.
In sum, we are exchanging our civilisational memory for megawatts.
This crisis is not just at a single archaeological site. The activities of the Digital Heritage Trails Project (DHTP) in the Indus Delta in Pakistan also capture the situation of threats to heritage landscapes from the coastline back, due to climate change, environmental degradation, and ecosystem instability.
The lines are easy to follow: what is happening at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa is a regional emergency unfolding as an accelerated loss of cultural memory and community life in the Indus Basin, due to increased environmental vulnerability.
Who is responsible for this injustice of the trade? During my ethnographic field research in Qadirabad, which lasted for 11 months, I was able to witness in detail how the Sahiwal plant had impacted the lives of female farmers in the area.
Their access to clean water and their livestock began to be reduced, their children started missing school, and respiratory illnesses began to be transmitted through the household.
Such women were not included in the environmental impact assessments. They were not included in the data on their grief. But they are the living archives of a landscape before the plant, before the state of Pakistan, and possibly even before us.
What is to be done? The answer begins with a fundamental reorientation: communities are not obstacles to heritage preservation — they are heritage itself.
Culture, ecology, and ritual are passed down among the people who live near Harappa, and these cannot be reproduced in a museum.
The first question to ask, if one is interested in preserving these World Heritage properties, is: what do they know, what do they need, and what do they refuse to lose?
Community-based archaeology and heritage work is a process that produces “possible futures,” as Professor Rizvi has already said, but only if the institutions will listen before they excavate and care before they curate.
Pakistan needs to take three immediate steps. Firstly, all industrial projects within 100 kilometres of a UNESCO-listed site should require compulsory health and heritage impact assessments, with results incorporating community testimony rather than relying solely on technical measurements.
Secondly, there needs to be a dedicated climate-resilience fund for heritage sites within the federal government, with a focus on international climate finance mechanisms to which Pakistan is already entitled as a frontline country.
Thirdly, local communities living near Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, and other threatened sites must be formally recognised as heritage stewards — with legal standing, financial support, and decision-making power over the landscapes they have inhabited for centuries.
Safia still farms her field in Sahiwal, beneath a sky she no longer fully recognises. The ancient city of Harappa stands sixty kilometres away, its brick walls absorbing industrial particulates with no protection and no voice.
Between these two realities, a living woman and a dying ruin lie the full measure of what Pakistan stands to lose if it continues to treat development as the opposite of heritage, and communities as incidental to history.
The earth remembers what we forget. The question is whether we will act before it forgets us entirely.