When the cloudbursts struck Buner in August 2025, thirty-six members of one family retreated to what they believed were safe rooms. The NDMA red alert that morning warned of flash floods across upper Pakistan but named no villages to evacuate, no time to move, and no route to safety. The family never left. None survived. This tragedy illustrates the central question of 2026: will warnings again exist without the infrastructure and instructions to act on them?

Pakistan now has roughly one hundred days before the monsoon, which NDMA projects to be 22 to 26 per cent more intense than 2025, its standing baseline still used by all federal and provincial departments. This winter brought below-normal snowfall across Gilgit-Baltistan, with many valleys left bare and rocky. Daytime temperatures in glacier zones ran 3 to 5 degrees Celsius above normal. Melt has already begun ahead of schedule. NDMA advisories warn that this early snowmelt is raising runoff into glacial lakes and increasing the risk of outburst floods before the monsoon even arrives. For many vulnerable districts in Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Sindh, that window is closing fast.

The 2025 floods were severe. NDMA figures confirmed in its December 2025 post-monsoon seminar report and submitted to the United Nations show that 1,037 people died, including more than 275 children. Nearly seven million were affected, almost three million displaced, and over 229,763 homes were damaged or destroyed. Punjab experienced its worst flooding in four decades. These are official figures, not estimates.

The warnings existed but were too vague to act on. NDMA’s 23 August red alert named whole provinces, not specific communities, and offered no actionable evacuation instructions. Parliamentarians later asked the NDMA chairman whether the organisation’s job was only to collect bodies. One positive development was that Punjab’s mass evacuations were better coordinated than in 2022, saving thousands of lives. The tragedy is that the physical infrastructure, the embankments and bunds that actually hold water back, failed exactly as previous inquiries had predicted.

Authorities were forced to breach flood protection bunds to prevent total dam collapses, sending uncontrolled water into thousands of homes. Multiple breaches occurred at the Nauraja Bhutta bund in Jalalpur Pirwala while irrigation teams attempted repairs. The 2023 Punjab Irrigation Act is explicit about pre-monsoon inspections and protocols for deliberate breaching. In 2025 those statutory procedures were ignored, proving the law exists only on paper, not on the riverbank.

This is not ignorance; it is a habit. Justice Mansoor Ali Shah’s 2010 inquiry, A Rude Awakening, condemned the very breaches and absent protocols we saw in 2025. A 2016 Dutch panel, the 2019 National Plan, and the 2022 catastrophe that cost 9 per cent of GDP all said the same thing. Each report was ignored; the officials named for negligence were promoted.

Post-2025 commitments followed the same script. On 19 November 2025, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif approved the Fix, Expand, and Build strategy, committing to repair dykes, floodgates, and critical infrastructure within 200 to 250 days. Yet in August 2025, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb admitted what critics had long charged: Pakistan failed to prepare investable projects to utilise the $11 billion pledged after the 2022 floods. The money was there. The plans were not. That gap between pledge and project will persist until the new strategy is backed by genuine compliance and public transparency, not press releases. No independent assessment has confirmed that the 790 damaged bridges, 2,811 kilometres of roads, and breached embankments have been repaired or certified. Field reports from October 2025 described work as under repair. Relocation plans for the katcha-belt communities have promised much, delivered nothing. They will again be the first to drown. A mandatory pre-monsoon Right to Relocation for these communities, with identified safe sites and compensation under the 2023 Act, is no longer optional; it is the only way to break the cycle of predictable deaths.

NDMA has diagnosed the problem clearly. Its December 2025 seminar report, Building Back Better, states that disaster risk accumulates years before exposure and rainfall reveals pre-existing vulnerabilities. The same report calculates that each rupee spent before a disaster saves five to ten in recovery. On 8 January 2026, with endorsement from the Prime Minister’s Office, NDMA launched the Infrastructure Audit Programme 2026 to inspect and certify embankments, bridges, drainage systems, and critical public buildings before the monsoon. This is welcome, but it is being asked to do what Punjab law already mandates. If the Infrastructure Audit Programme 2026 remains a closed-door bureaucratic exercise, it will follow its predecessors into the archives of failure. For the audit to have teeth, its findings and the names of the certifying officers must be made public before the first cloudbursts.

Pre-flood inspection requires engineers to examine every embankment, floodgate, and drainage channel in flood-risk zones, certify them as fit for purpose, or flag them for emergency repair, with a named officer accountable for results. Where repairs cannot be finished in time, communities must be placed on early evacuation protocols. Families also need supplies, evacuation knowledge, and communication plans that do not depend on mobile networks that fail during heavy rain. Local volunteers trained in basic first aid and rescue coordination can reduce pressure on official responders, as demonstrated in 2025 in Swat. Community preparedness complements, rather than replaces, state responsibility.

Pakistan has the judicial findings, engineering assessments, international precedents, the 2023 Punjab law, and now a nationally mandated audit programme. What has been missing across fifteen years and four catastrophic flood seasons is the enforcement culture that turns warnings into action.

Mohsin LeghariThe writer is a former Senator, MPA, MNA, and former Minister of Irrigation Punjab.

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