THE floods are visiting us again. The death toll will be counted within days. The damage to roads, bridges and embankments will be tallied within weeks and translated into a dollar figure. Expect this assessment to dominate the coverage. It is legitimate but a wrong ledger regardless. The real casualty of this flood, and the one before it, and the one before that, is not standing in the rubble. It is sitting in a classroom that no longer exists, or should be sitting there and is not.

Pakistan is a country where 40 per cent of the population is under 15, where 93 million children are of school age, where the state has for years spent less than one per cent of GDP on health and less than 2pc on education despite disasters. When the water recedes, the roads get rebuilt. The child who missed seven weeks of school, who was screened for severe acute malnutrition at a flood clinic, who caught malaria from a collapsed WASH system, does not get rebuilt on the same timeline. Evidence from the 2005 earthquake shows four weeks of closure can cost a child one and a half years of learning four years later. Pakistan has just handed its children five years of near continuous disruption: Covid, the 2022 floods, the 2024 heatwaves, the 2025 floods. Each calamity more severe than the last.

Before the 2022 floods, 26.2m children were already out of school, the second highest figure in the world. The floods destroyed or damaged 27,000 schools, converted 5,000 more into relief camps, and locked 3.5m children out of learning in a single season. By January 2023, only........

© Dawn