MUZAFFARGARH: When the flood of the Chenab destroyed houses and crops in villages on the west side of the river in the tehsils of Kot Addu and Muzaffargarh last year, their residents took a few months to rebuild their houses and life returned to normalcy.

They are again homeless due to erosion in the river and this time it appears they would not be able to recover for decades as their land is being eaten away by the river.

The affected villages include Basti Theri, Maqsoodpur, Jharian Wala, Head Mohammadwala, Muradabad, Sonaki, Hajipur, Lal Pu, Bhullay Wain and Mohanywala. More than 200 houses and hundreds of acres of these villages have vanished into the river water. Dawn visited the area and saw people evacuating and saving their daily life articles from their houses.

Haji Abbas, a villager, said the erosion started two weeks back and since then it had affected 200 houses which were earlier half a kilometer away from the river. He said the executive engineer of irrigation and the superintendent engineer were informed about the issue but no positive response came from them.

Ghulam Raza said there were 100 homes in Maqsoodpur but now only a dozen of them had been left while others were buried in the river. The remaining houses were also at the risk of being destroyed, he said, adding the irrigation officials had supplied stones only on papers but no actual work was done.

Nazim Husain said each affected person was given compensation in floods by the NGOs as well as the government but despite losing everything in the erosion, there was nobody to help them.

The affected people alleged that the erosion was because of absence of the spur on the western side of the river, saying that during the PML-Q term, the spur was built on the eastern side of the river and the villages on that side were safe. They said some local politicians had occupied the river land.

The affectees have appealed to the chief minister to visit their area because the situation was no less than floods, adding that nobody from the district administration had visited them.

Talking to Dawn, DCO Hafiz Shaukat Ali said his team was busy assessing the loss due to erosion and after that lists would be sent to the provincial capital to ask for compensation for the affectees.

Published in Dawn, March 18th, 2015

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