MULTAN, May 9: Although provinces are falling out on water distribution owing to acute water shortage, the Multan district has started looking ways to combat flood during the coming monsoon.

Presiding over a meeting on flood here on Thursday, Multan DCO Maj Azam Suleman Khan (retired) directed all the departments concerned to complete their spadework to fight against flood before June 15.

The meeting was told that the Multan district had been divided into 18 sectors, adding that a tehsildar or a naib tehsildar would be the incharge of each sector.

It was estimated that 106 villages and their 400,000 inhabitants besides standing crop on 179,000 acres would be affected due to the expected flood.

Committees at tehsil level comprising government and local body officials had been constituted for the evacuation of people from affected villages.

A civil defence officer informed the meeting that his department had arranged two lifeboats of 40 and 48 horse powers each to get the people evacuated from the flood-hit areas.

Food and medicines for the likely-to-be-affected human beings and animals (livestock) had been stocked.

The Executive District Officer (EDO), health, said his department had divided the district into 16 sectors to provide medical care to the affected people.

District heads of various government departments and tehsil Nazimeen also attended the meeting to ‘face the challenge’.

When contacted, a senior government official said the administrative officers held such meetings compulsorily irrespective of the ground realities.

He said sometime the competent authority banned the entry of some ‘unwanted’ people like political and religious leaders without bothering to know whether they were alive.

During the height of current Pak-India military tension at the borders, the DCO had ordered digging of ditches around every government office in Multan which was not a bordering area.