KARACHI, Feb 9: Recognising that due to the poor disaster management activities thousands of people affected by the 2011 floods are still suffering great hardship, speakers at a ceremony on Thursday called for a full-fledged body to respond to rescue and rehabilitation needs.
The event, organised by the Hands Institute of Community Development, was held to mark the launch of book ‘The 2011 Sindh Flood — impact, causes and repercussions’, compiled and edited by Zulfiqar Halepoto.
Sindh Assembly Speaker Nisar Khuhro, who spoke on the occasion, said that strong infrastructure along the Indus river embankment and monitoring of channels and drains was needed. Though the rains of 2011 were unprecedented, that offered no excuse to the relevant quarters to justify their incompetence, he added.
Head of the Thardeep Rural Development Programme, Sono Khangharani, said that unlike the floods of 2010, this time the government worked at the initial stage only, and the NGOs and certain international donors had helped bear the burden of the disaster.
Dr Kaiser Bengali, former adviser to the Sindh chief minister, contended that the provincial disaster management expertise needed to be reorganised and equipped in terms of logistics, medicines and food. Mr Bengali also suggested custom-built villages at safer places.
Noted town planner Arif Hasan said that rehabilitation was a long-term goal which could not be achieved in four or five years and added that relief and rehabilitation measures would be successful only if they were decentralised to have the process expedited with greater participation of people and aid agencies, he said.
A writer on development issues, Najma Sadeq, said that the sufferings of people due to the floods had been terrible, but little had been learnt from that. The 2011 type floods did not come overnight, she said, adding that the BBC had highlighted the flood phenomena in Sindh and Pakistan about two years back, but no one paid heed to the forecast.
Ibrar Kazi, President of the Awami Jamhoori Party, said it was high time that attention was paid to the predicted change of the Indus river course and that villages should be built in clusters instead of scattered.
Chairman of HANDS
Dr Abdul Ghaffar Billoo said that the book by Mr Halepoto revealed that people and planners were ignorant of floods and disaster management response and a capable disaster management mechanism should be established on a priority basis.
The deputy high commissioner of the United Kingdom at Karachi, Frances Campbell, said the book comprising write-ups and reports from over 60 contributors highlighted, among other things, the collaborative efforts of the NGOs, local community, military and international organisations.
Retired Justice Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim said that despite the fact that rehabilitation after the floods had been miserable in some cases, he was optimistic that we would be able to identify problems and solve them. The author of the book, Mr Halepoto, said that he had documented what had been printed and published in newspapers on the issue, which would certainly pave the way for new dynamics in dealing with natural calamities and climate change to avert the damage to the land and its inhabitants.