Hussain Bakhsh has spent more than a week living in a temporary residence on a highway with 20 relatives after being forced to leave his village in Pakistan’s southwest after his home was destroyed by floodwaters.
Over 30 million Pakistanis, including Bakhsh, are now homeless as a result of this year’s monsoon rains, which also claimed the lives of over 930 individuals. The worst affected areas by flooding and rain damage in the nation are Sindh in the south and the Balochistan province in the southwest.
On Thursday, the nation’s minister of climate change referred to the situation as “an enormous humanitarian calamity caused by climate change.”
“I have been living with my children for the last eight days in a small camp, which has a plastic roof,” Bakhsh, 70, told. “I don’t have a tent or food items for my family.”
“There was so much flooding and it’s been 8 days that we are lying on the roads,” he said. “Government has done nothing at all and we didn’t get any relief. We are poor people and we are dying due to hunger.”
Indeed, the most impoverished region of Pakistan, Balochistan, has suffered the most from the recent rains, with much of its land covered in water and its key roads and highways cut off from the rest of the nation. Since mid-June, rains have killed at least 230 people in the province.
The financial difficulties Pakistan is facing will make funding and reconstruction activities difficult. Pakistan must reduce spending in order to get the International Monetary Fund to approve the release of much-needed bailout funds.
In a study, the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said that over 82,000 dwellings had suffered partial or total damage, and 150 kilometers of roads had been damaged nationwide in the previous 24 hours.
According to the NDMA’s most recent situation assessment, since the monsoon started in mid-June, more than 3,000 kilometers of roads, 130 bridges, and 495,000 homes have suffered damage.
The major regions of Balochistan, such as Jaffarabad, Naseerabad, and Sibi, have experienced flooding, and locals are currently camping out next to highways with their leftover belongings and cattle.
The floodwaters in Dera Allah Yar’s Murad Colony area entirely destroyed Muhammad Suleman’s village, according to the 37-year-old who lost his house, his crops, and his cattle there.
“The government has left us to die under the sky,” he told. “We are surrounded by water since it has been raining for the last three days. Our children are falling sick, and there is a danger of major outbreak of disease in the entire Naseerabad division.”
“100 percent of our villages are destroyed. Livestock has died. Wheat stock is finished. Rice fields are destroyed. Houses are damaged. Nothing is left.”
Another resident of the same colony, Amanullah, said more than five feet of water had entered his home last week, and his family had no option but to leave and find a safer place.
“We have waited for 24 hours, but not a single government representative has come to see our plight. Now, we are moving toward the bypass to seek refuge,” the 18-year-old said, pointing toward a main thoroughfare.
Speaking to Arab News, the deputy commissioner of Jaffarabad, Abdul Razzaq KHajjak, said about half a million people in the district had been affected by floods, but the administration was doing its best to provide relief.
“Jaffarabad is not the only district hit by flood but the entire province is drowned,” he said. “The Provincial Disaster Management Authority has provided us 800 tents and we have distributed them among our people, but the scale of the floods is huge and it will take us time to deliver relief goods in all corners of the district.”
Balochistan Chief minister Abdul Quddus Bizenjo told reporters the government would provide compensation:
“We will make houses for all these people. Whoever lost their livestock, we will give them animals. Whoever lost their agricultural lands, we will help them revive them. Whatever damages have occurred, we will provide the compensation.”
