On a recent night, in the popular talk show Aaj Shahzeb Khanzada Kay Saath aired on Geo TV, a local reporter from Multan said something chilling. Even after a breach in the highway near Jalalpur Pirwala, the flood level in the area had hardly gone down after 24 hours. People were restless, their homes surrounded by water, their crops gone. And the reporter added—local voices and even experts are whispering the same: the real culprit is not only the flood, but the newly rehabilitated Panjnad Barrage, financed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
The rehabilitation project, completed only in March 2025, was supposed to make Panjnad safe and modern. Its design promised to pass 850,000 cusecs smoothly. But today, even at 500,000 to 680,000 cusecs, water is not flowing away quickly. Why? Because two critical design features—the end sill in the main weir, and the concrete divide island—have worked against the river’s natural rhythm. In simple terms, the end sill is like a raised block at the downstream floor. It was meant to tame turbulence. But if it is too high, it becomes an obstacle, forcing the river to back up. The divide island, meant to guide flows, in practice narrows the opening, slows down the flood, and traps silt. Together, these structures have created higher upstream water levels—exactly the suffering being witnessed today in Jalalpur Pirwala. Instead of accelerating the passage of floodwaters, the so-called modernisation and rehabilitation have effectively throttled the river at its throat. The irony is cruel: a project financed to increase safety has ended up manufacturing danger, choking entire towns and villages that trusted the promise of development banks and engineering experts.
This is not the first time engineering has worsened the Indus Basin’s misery. There is a long and bitter history of such disasters. The Left Bank Outfall Drain (LBOD) was built to carry away saline water, but during heavy rains it acted as a wall, pushing floodwaters into the left bank villages of Sindh, drowning entire landscapes. The World Bank’s own Inspection Panel later admitted that design mistakes had aggravated the disaster.
Similarly, the ADB-funded Chashma Right Bank Canal (CRBC-III) ignored the fury of hill torrents. Its cross-drainage works were wrongly designed. In the 2022 floods, torrents smashed through, drowning vast parts of Taunsa Sharif Tehsil. Farmers lost their age-old rowed-kohi irrigation system, and since then the canal itself has been dysfunctional. Yet Pakistan still pays millions of dollars in loan repayments to ADB for this white elephant. The ADB’s own Inspection Panel acknowledged local complaints were justified.
The World Bank too has its shameful share. In the Taunsa Barrage Rehabilitation Project, the addition of a secondary weir downstream created a new barrier. Instead of helping, it forced water to rise and break through the left marginal embankment, submerging Kot Addu and Muzaffargarh. Billions of dollars in damages followed, exactly as local people had warned—but were ignored.
And now Panjnad. The same story, the same arrogance, the same results. In Jalalpur Pirwala, families are sitting on rooftops. In Seetpur, Alipur, and even Shujabad, people are wading through chest-high water. The confluence of Sutlej and Chenab floods, the raised upstream area, the blockage from Motorway M-5, and above all the failure of Panjnad Barrage to pass water swiftly—these have together turned the region into a sea. Millions are suffering. Yet there is no accountability: neither the multilateral development banks like the World Bank and ADB, nor the engineering bureaucracy of Punjab, are held answerable for drowning millions while forcing Pakistan deeper into foreign debt. Instead of solutions, they have given us calamities packaged as projects.
The lesson is clear. Our engineering establishments, backed by foreign banks, promise safety but deliver catastrophe. Each time they cut rivers into rigid channels, build concrete blocks and embankments, they forget the truth: rivers need room. The solution is not more barriers, but the restoration of natural drainage and space for rivers to breathe. Yet this demands courage to abandon the colonial hydraulics imposed by the British, still ruling our thinking decades after the so-called independence.
Finally, there is a political truth. As long as the Siraiki region is ruled from afar, its voice will not matter. Autonomy and self-rule are essential so that local knowledge, local practices, and local priorities can shape water and flood management. In pre-colonial times, communities had their own systems, imperfect but adapted to the land. Today, imposed mega-projects have left only ruin.
The floods of 2025 at Panjnad are not just a natural disaster—they are an engineered calamity. Until we reimagine water management radically, and until Siraiki people have the power to decide their fate, such tragedies will return again and again.