The 2025 Punjab floods affecting 3,300 villages show why ancient wisdom beats modern warfare against rivers

The images from Punjab this monsoon tell a familiar, heartbreaking story. Villages submerged, families displaced, crops destroyed, and infrastructure crumbling under the relentless force. Over 3,300 villages affected, 1.3 million people displaced - and this is barely two years after the 2022 catastrophe that cost us USD 30 billion and affected 33 million Pakistanis.

We have been fighting this same battle for a long time. Every few years, the Indus and its tributaries remind us who really controls this land. Our response has remained stubbornly consistent: build the embankments higher, pray they hold, and when they inevitably fail, cut emergency breaches and count the casualties.

This approach has failed catastrophically. The time has come for Pakistan’s policymakers to embrace a revolutionary but proven alternative: stop fighting water and start living with it.

In the katcha areas near Rojhan, where communities have lived with floods for generations, a community elder named Ikram Khan speaks truths that our engineers are finally learning to understand: “River is generous, if it will take one crop, it will give you dozens of good ones. Let it flow, don’t enchain it.”

Ikram Khan’s words carry the weight of lived experience. He has watched the river’s seasonal rhythms, seen how floods destroy but also how they deposit fertile silt, recharge groundwater, and sustain the ecosystem that makes agriculture possible. “Indus tells you when it is coming,” he explains, “rises slowly, warning you to make way for the mighty Indus to pass, like a royal entourage.”

His metaphor captures something our engineers have forgotten: the Indus doesn’t sneak up on you like a flash........

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