The British left seventy-eight years ago, but their ghost still walks the banks of the Indus. Every monsoon, when the rivers swell up and burst out, we reach for the same old tools the Raj handed down: throw up higher bunds, cut breaches when the water gets too high, dole out relief, patch up the gaps, and pray the next year behaves itself. This November, as the National Disaster Management Authority rolls out its latest warning – a 2026 monsoon that could dump 22 to 26 per cent more rain than the nightmare of 2025 – the government is once again reaching for the same colonial playbook, only with better PowerPoint slides and faster WhatsApp alerts.
Lieutenant General Inam Haider Malik did not mince his words at the Press Information Department last week. Glacial melt has sped up to 2–3 per cent a year, more than fifty lakes sit ready to burst, heatwaves are drying out the plains before the clouds finally break open, and when they do, the deluge will come down in days, not weeks. Reservoirs will fill up in hours, engineers will have to let water out through walls, and the same old bunds will give way exactly where they gave way last year and the year before.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, fresh from chairing a high-level huddle, signed off on the usual plan: fix what broke this time (in 240–250 days), expand a few drains over the next couple of years, and rebuild “resiliently” over five years. Early warnings will now ring first in the assistant commissioner’s office instead of winding their way down from Islamabad. Mobile hospitals and tent schools will be trucked in earlier. Tourism in the north will be reined in during danger months. All sensible, all urgent, all painfully familiar.
Because nowhere in the hundreds of pages of briefings does anyone admit that the old normal is gone for good. The phrases that keep cropping up – “restore normalcy”, “get life back on track”, “minimise disruption to development” – betray the real thinking: this is still seen as a nasty interruption, not the new rule. Patch up the bunds, hand out the cheques, wait for the water to go down, and everything will settle back into the comfortable pattern we knew in the 1980s.
Every time we talk about ‘restoring normalcy’, we admit we haven’t accepted that the river has changed its mind forever
Hydrologist Dr Hassan Abbas has been pointing this out for years, and he is blunter than ever. “We are still fighting the river with nineteenth-century weapons,” he says. “Every time we talk about ‘restoring normalcy’, we admit we haven’t accepted that the river has changed its mind forever. Higher bunds and mega-dams only store up bigger disasters for the day they finally give way.”
The tragedy is that we already know what living with the new normal looks like – our ancestors did it for millennia before the British straightened the Indus into a giant irrigation canal. They let the river spill out across the floodplains every year, planted rice and sorghum that thrived on the silt, raised fish in the seasonal ponds, and recharged the biggest underground reservoir in the world lying beneath our feet. The flood was not an enemy; it was the annual delivery of fresh soil and water.
Today, we could bring that system back, smarter and at scale. Give the river room by clearing encroachments and turning depressions into managed wetlands. Switch subsidies from water-guzzling sugarcane to flood-tolerant crops and aquaculture. Lay down strict zoning so no new housing colonies spring up in the katcha. Turn restored marshes into carbon sinks that pull in billions in international climate finance. Open up seasonal waterways for cheap inland navigation that would spare our roads from another beating every July.
None of this is pie-in-the-sky. Bangladesh is already cashing in on blue-carbon credits from revived mangroves. The Dutch have turned “giving room to the river” into an export industry. Even India is quietly shifting thousands of families out of the Brahmaputra floodway and paying them to farm fish instead of fighting the water.
Pakistan, meanwhile, keeps betting everything on holding the river in a vice until the vice snaps. We pour concrete into higher and higher embankments that only speed the water downstream to the next weak point. We dream of cascading dams that silt up before the first turbine spins. And every year we act shocked – shocked! – when the same districts drown again.
The NDMA’s 2026 forecast is not just another warning; it is a countdown. If we carry on patching and praying, the next breach will not just take out a few hundred kilometres of road – it will take out the illusion that we can ever go back. The colonial bunds have had their day. It is time to let the river breathe, or it will keep reminding us, louder and louder, who really runs this country.