On 30 July 2026, Federal Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal announced that the National Flood Protection Plan would be placed before the Council of Common Interests. The cost now stands at Rs 700 billion. The same plan was approved by the CCI in 2017 at roughly half that sum. The minister acknowledged that the previous governments had left it unimplemented and that the 2022 floods had made a revision unavoidable. Nearly a decade after the plan was first prepared, the country is back at the same point, only Rs 360 billion deeper in the same failure.

Yet Pakistan already possesses the legal instruments this plan claims to address. In 2016, the Punjab Assembly passed the Floodplain Regulation Act, designating flood-prone zones and criminalizing construction without written permission. In 2023, the Punjab Irrigation Act—which I shepherded as Irrigation Minister—mandated strict embankment standards, River Ledgers of vulnerabilities, and binding impact simulations before any river training work. The frameworks exist. What does not exist is the will to enforce them.

The observation is accurate. The amnesia is deliberate. We have tried this four times since 1978. Four plans. Four decades. Four times we approved the paperwork, ignored the embankments, and watched the water take our people. The Federal Flood Commission, established in 1977 after the devastating floods of 1973 and 1976, executed NFPP-I from 1978 to 1988, NFPP-II from 1988 to 1998, and NFPP-III from 1998 to 2008. NFPP-IV was originally drafted in 2006, then revised after the catastrophic 2010 floods. Approved at Rs 340 billion in 2017, it remains unimplemented nine years later. Now the bill has grown by Rs 360 billion, and we are back where we started.

But there is a problem with the numbers, and it is not a small one. In November 2025, Secretary Water Resources Syed Ali Murtaza testified before the Senate that this plan comprised 375 schemes costing over Rs 824 billion, with the provinces supposed to pay nearly Rs 747 billion. He told the committee that the provinces had refused to........

© The Friday Times