A worried Kanji Kohli has been walking for several hours along with his herd of buffaloes. Kohli has opted for temporary migration from his village, Nawab Notkani in Mirpurkhas District. A breach in a saline water drain has left his village inundated. The drain was breached after receiving heavy flows of rainwater released from different farmlands in the area.

“I have to keep walking for the sake of my cattle,” he tells me when we come across each other on the Naukot-Mithi road on the outskirts of Jhuddo, a tehsil in Mirpurkhas district. “All the fodder is submerged in and around my village. So, I am taking them to dry land in Mithi nearby, so that they can feed.” Jhuddo has assumed the appearance of a bleak floating city ever since the monsoon rains deluged Sindh in July and August.

Kohli has lost his cotton crop (known as phutti in Sindhi), which grew on two acres, and his chillies’ harvest to the flash floods, thus losing his investment and return for the current season. Yet, he still plans to find his way back home. “Once the water recedes,” he adds, “I will return to my village.”

The massive rains in Sindh — more than five times the average — have led to devastations of epic proportions and untold human tragedy. Reports of short-term migration by panicked residents, like Kanji, have poured in from upper Sindh too. A flood protective dyke runs for several miles in Sindh, protecting its districts against hill torrents emanating from Balochistan. Multiple breaches in this flood protective (FP) bund have been reported. Breaches in the FP bund, triggered by Balochistan’s torrents, have forced people from upper Sindh’s Qambar-Shahdadkot and Dadu districts to migrate to other places, as floodwaters began to breach banks and entered Khairpur’s Nathan Shah on August 30.

Sindh has been the most affected province in the recent floods. The scale of the devastation is epic and it could get even worse

“Water from [the FP bund breach] has surrounded Khairpur’s Nathan Shah [KN Shah] taluka, which has a population of around 450,000,” says Sikandar Gulab, an academic and resident of the area. “Around 90 percent of the local population there got frightened and has migrated,”

Since the rainfall has been exceptional in Sindh this year, the resultant flows of rainwater in some left bank districts, such as Benazirabad, Sanghar and Mirpurkhas, also entered the wastewater drain in the Left Bank Outfall Drain (LBOD) system. Landowners, resorting to the usual practice in such circumstances, cut out sub-drains for the disposal of rainwater stagnating in their fields. The LBOD system carries the heavy discharge a bit sluggishly, thereby building pressure on cities like Jhuddo, Tando Jan Mohammad, etc., and consequently choking the drainage.

“These flows have proved disastrous in Balochistan,” says the Chief Engineer Sindh Small Dams Shafqat Wadhu. “The volume of flows [from the FP bund is very high. The situation is going to get very alarming in Sindh,” he remarked on August 30.

Sindh’s Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) on August 29 reported 405 deaths and 1,074 injured persons due to the rains. The authority says 16,422 livestock have perished. A population of 7.143 million is affected while 3.996 million persons are displaced. It puts the area of damaged crops at 3.519m acres.

Thousands have ended up in improvised tents on the roadsides of the main highways. The sight of men, women and children passing sleepless nights under the open skies is hard to see; they are living in subhuman conditions after having lost their mud houses. Everywhere the eye travels, villages are under knee-deep water.

The relief camps set up in the cities and villages provide makeshift shelter to the flood affectees, but without adequate arrangements to meet their sanitation and hygiene needs. People who belong to districts in upper Sindh have travelled to find shelter in cities as far south as Hyderabad and Jamshoro.

At the time of writing this piece, large swathes of agricultural land remain under water. Residents in city centres such as Hyderabad, Sukkur, Benazirabad and Mirpurkhas have faced urban flooding, too. A poor drainage system and construction of unauthorised structures over main drains in cities like Hyderabad have made life hell for the local residents.

“The drainage system was laid several years ago,” contends Hyderabad’s Deputy Commissioner Fuad Ghaffar Soomro, who is also in charge of the Hyderabad Development Authority (HDA). Its drainage capacity merits enhancement, given the increasing population, he points out. “Climate change-driven weather patterns are a reality now. Rains experienced this year are going to become a regular phenomenon in the future.”

The drainage factor always makes matters worse for upper and lower Sindh. The LBOD system in the left bank areas is largely considered responsible for rain-related damages every year. This time too, as the pressure built due to the slow disposal of rainwater by the LBOD, it led to displacement of communities initially. Then came two breaches in the Puran Dhoro waterway near oil-rich Badin on August 28.

The scale of the present disaster is huge. The super floods of 2010 had drowned one fourth of Pakistan in the same months that year and the right bank districts of Sindh were devastated. Twelve years down the road, the relentless monsoons have spelt disaster for Sindh again.

The Sindh government’s preliminary assessment puts losses to kharif crops and infrastructure in the billions. “The initial assessment shows a loss of 860 billion rupees so far,” says Sindh Chief Secretary Dr Mohammad Sohail Rajput. The rice crop has suffered damages. However, it is primarily the cotton crop that has been washed away in lower Sindh, barring a few areas where it survived despite rains. Orchards of mango and banana have been inundated as well. Sugarcane, despite being a high delta crop, is equally affected.

“If things remain this way due to the weather-driven crisis, we may face a wheat shortage after losing the summer crop,” says Mahmood Nawaz Shah, vice president of Sindh Abadgar Board.

The Indus river is currently witnessing high flood downstream of the Sukkur barrage. After breaching the FP bund, Balochistan’s torrent waters will eventually enter Manchhar Lake, which empties into the Indus. The mighty Indus is already swollen with a flow of 530,750 cusecs by August 30. Flows could hit Bubak and Wahur (home to Chief Minster Sindh) if any breach occurs in the Manchhar Containing Bund.

Back in Mirpurkhas, Ramo Kohli is living with his family in one of the improvised tents whose rows dot the landscape. He belongs to the same marginalised community as Kanji. “It’s been a week [living here]. We are going through psychological trauma,” says the displaced man. “Our women and children go to open spaces to defecate,” Ramo says. “We are left with nothing. There is water everywhere around us,” he laments.

The writer is a member of staff

Published in Dawn, EOS, September 4th, 2022