Twenty-years ago in Athara Hazari (Jhang district), a few months after the birth of her daughter, Khadija Bibi began saving for her daughter’s wedding. Rupee by rupee, she filled steel trunks with hand-embroidered quilts, china tea sets, gold bangles and silk suits, like rural mothers do.

This year Chenab’s flood’s muddy floodwater swept through her house and carried it all away. “The jahez is gone”, she told relief workers. “Everything I gathered for my daughter’s new home is floating in the street.”

Saleem, an office manager at a textile mill in Lahore had used his lifelong savings and took a loan from the employer and the bank to build his house in a housing society on the banks of Ravi, his house is inundated and all household items submerged chest high water. “How will I pay off the loans” he asks, with a look of wilderness.

In Dulla Akoka (Bahawalnagar) along the path of the Sutlej, Ghulam Hussain saw his thirty-five acres buried under six feet of sand and silt, a comfortable middle class livelihood source erased. These are not statistics. They are broken lives – and unfortunately much of the devastation was preventable.

Punjab is not short of laws. The Punjab Flood Plain Regulation Act 2016 empowers the government to declare floodplains off-limits for construction, override municipal permissions and even restrain federal agencies from unsafe development.

The Punjab Irrigation, Drainage and Rivers Act 2023 goes further, mandating River Ledgers of vulnerabilities, annual flood protection plans and strict technical standards for embankments. Section 88 explicitly forbids river training works without impact simulations – the very analyses missing in many recent failures. On paper, this framework is as advanced as any in the world. In practice, it is a........

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