WHEN city and provincial governments become susceptible to conflicts of interest and greed, destruction becomes people’s destiny. Unfortunately, the greedy real estate developers and their political godfathers have together been able to force city and provincial governments to turn a blind eye to their grandiose vision of high-rise buildings that are surrounded by artificial canals. As such, the establishment of the Ravi Urban Development Authority (Ruda) in Lahore was one such project.

Other housing schemes have mush-roomed around the periphery of the city and now pose a hindrance to the natural flow of river path.

Environmentalists had warned of the danger, but the bureaucracy and powerful lobbies prevailed over such voices of sanity, arguing that such floods occur ‘once in a thousand years’. Well, nature has its own ways, and chooses its own time. Those ‘thousand’ years passed by rather quickly, and the Ravi river has been in high floods already, forcing people to move to safer zones while leaving everything behind.

We have just witnessed large-scale destruction in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) where massive deforestation and unregulated mining of rocks and marble have been going on unchecked and unabated for years. Even the Margalla Hills in the federal capital have fallen victim to this unchecked greed.

Malik Tariq Ali
Lahore

Published in Dawn, August 31st, 2025