Warnings Were Funded. Warnings Were Known. Warnings Never Reached.

Entire valleys in Gilgit Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were swallowed in minutes, families torn apart as rivers rose with a fury long foretold. Mothers clutched their children against walls of water. Fathers dug bare-handed through mud where their homes once stood. This was not a surprise of nature. It was a disaster foretold, funded, and ignored. And that truth is more chilling than the floodwaters themselves: the State knew, and still let its people die. Can we dare to ask the State what is the worth of its people’s lives in its ledger of priorities? #flooding
Over the last fifteen years, Pakistan has taken in hundreds of millions of dollars for disaster preparedness.
•The World Bank gave $188 million for the Hydromet and Resilience Project.
•The UNDP Green Climate Fund pumped $37 million into GLOF-II for GB and KPK.
•Japan funded radars in Karachi, Islamabad, and Multan, the Karachi Doppler alone worth $18 million.
•The ADB financed flood resilience across Sindh and Punjab.

With this scale of investment, Pakistan should have a modern, responsive early warning system. Instead, we have a graveyard of projects polished in reports, dead in reality.

•PMD runs the radars but cannot deliver timely, localized alerts.
•NDMA, empowered under the 2010 Act, should command in crisis. It behaves like a post office.
•PDMAs remain starved, politically ignored.
•Deputy Commissioners treat warnings as memos, not life or death orders.

The result? Forecasts exist in Islamabad. Villages drown in Swat and Hunza.