Badin and Thatta will drown by 2050 and Karachi by 2060 if immediate steps are not taken to check sea intrusion along the coastal area of Sindh. It is our nature to shrug off news of a disaster which will strike decades from now, about 45 years, into the future. We simply do not have the capacity to make such long-term plans. The five-year economic plan was our limit, and even that didn't quite pen out well. We are in the habit of being wise after the event. But since I am not likely to live to witness, my imagination has run wild picturing Karachi under water and how Karachiites will behave.
The Quaid's mazar will survive, since it is on high ground, like a forlorn marker showing where once there was a great city called Karachi. The enterprising land mafia will morph into sea mafia, selling floating homes. The Department of Tourism will take tourists dressed in scuba diving suites down to view the drowned city. Our other enterprising community, the dacoits, will go down in submersible pods to rifle bank vaults for gold. Paper money will be ignored as it probably will have turned to pulp. Or the government may order army and navy divers to get the gold from drowned bank vaults, and share the loot with generals: our government is good at legalized theft.
Thats enough of dark humour. This is no laughing matter. It is really serious and we need to take notice of it because part of Malir has already been affected by intrusion of seawater. Do you know, geographically speaking, Karachi is below sea level. I do not know why the city is still high and dry if it is below sea level. Nevertheless, this geographic fact is likely to speed the process of seawater intrusion. Seawater is rising at the rate of I.3 millimeters per year. It does not seem like much but, as they say, drops make an ocean, so this tiny yearly rise could make a massive flood.
The warning that Karachi will drown by 2060 came from the Sindh Board of Revenue and the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) in a briefing to the Senate Standing Committee on Science and Technology, last month. Natural and man-made factors are involved in advancing the sea inland. One is global warming which has caused the sea level to rise all over the world. Another is that the coast is eroding because mangrove forests have been indiscriminately cut for fuel and are dying choked by chemical waste from factories draining into the sea. The mangroves thrive in seawater and serve as a bulwark to prevent erosion of land caused by the onslaught of waved. Last December a three-member Supreme Court Bench extended a stay on the sale of 490 acres of mangrove marshes in the Malir River delta. It is part of a multi-billion rupee land development project in which several parties are involved.
The Malir River is normally dry unless rains make a raging, fast flowing body of water. But the Indus is virtually dead because of the number of dams built on it. Only about 11 mafs water flows through which gives a rivulet about 1/80th the size the Indus used to be hardly any water reaches the delta. The NIO briefing states, for 300 days in a year water did not go beyond Sujawal which was the main reason for sea intrusion in Badin and Thatta. According to H.T. Lambrik in his book "Sindh" vol-I, it is the Indus which made Sindh grain by grain layer by layer as it unloaded its huge burden of silt into the sea, gradually pushing the coastline further and further out. He writes there was a time you could not fix the coast of Sindh because it changed so fast, nearly every two years. Now the process has reversed. The sea's onslaught on the coast is crumbling it. In Badin 31,000 acres of coast has already drowned.
One solution to the threat of the advancing sea is to free the Indus River, which, of course, will never happen. Dams will stay and new ones continue to be added. The Senate Standing Committee proposed we should ensure water discharge in Kotri downstream strictly in accordance with the 1991 Water Accord. That, too, will not happen. Another solution is to ban land developers from draining and destroying the mangrove forest marches. This too will not happen because the developers are people with a lot of clout. Surely something can be done to prevent industrial waste from polluting and destroying the mangroves? But protests by environmentalists have fallen on deaf ears.
The fate of the Sindh coast, and also Balochistan, which is facing similar problem, is not a provincial matter. There should be national concern for the sea-facing border of the country. If Karachi is submerged it will be a national economic disaster. No wonder the Sindh Board of Revenue was involved in briefing the Senate Standing Committee on Science and Technology. Where will the cosmopolitan population of Karachi go when the disaster happens? Is anybody thinking and preparing an action plan or are they just talking? Just talking. So that brings me to the last hope to save the city. Pray to God and hope for the best. Amen. I do not think the city's patron saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi will be able to stop Karachi from drowning.
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