LAHORE, Sept 28: The Workers’ Party Pakistan (WPP) has slammed the government and international donors for paying scant attention to the plight of millions of people affected by the late monsoon floods, urging fresh analysis of structural causes of what they called man-made disaster.

In a press release issued here on Friday, the WPP president Abid Hasan Minto and information secretary Aasim Sajjad said though floods of two summers ago got so much attention of media, government and donors, there was no serious analysis of deeper structural causes of the flooding and everything was attributed to nature.

Terming the past and recent floods man-made disasters, they deplored that neither any serious attempt was being made to acknowledge this, nor to redress the infrastructural and other reasons for the flooding.

The WPP leaders alleged the interventions by the government and institutions like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB) in the water sector have from serious suffered design flaws, undermining the natural drainage systems and also causing all sorts of social and environmental degradation.

“However, the ‘experts’ continue to propagate failed water policies.”

They said the WB-funded Taunsa Barrage Emergency Rehabilitation and Modernisation Project (TBERMP) caused massive flooding of Muzzaffargarh district two summers ago but now a similar project had been undertaken at the Jinnah Barrage which, they predicted, would also fail spectacularly in the event of monsoon rains.

They demanded that the government as well as donors take immediate steps to redress the sufferings of flood victims.

Meanwhile, the demanded, independent appraisals of existing water policies must be undertaken, besides changes in policies so as to prevent more floods of a similar nature in the future.