karan.1970
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Well, your last line takes away the sympathy a normal Indian would naturally feel towards the flood victims.. Good job..
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Pakistan flood victims sell possessions and beg:Reuters.
- Thread starter DarK-LorD
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Well, your last line takes away the sympathy a normal Indian would naturally feel towards the flood victims.. Good job..
Windjammer i think you have worked out to a tee what bombay boy is. A little birdie tells me he is a dalit. Perhaps he experienced what happened to those poor dalits and the drinking has permenantly affected that 1 brain cell he has left.
On topic - Whether its Pakistan or anywhere else to make cheap snidey remarks or score points on a matter involving poverty and flood victims is a low life and not welcome by any normal person. As if the ones making these comments come from a land of plenty. I wont post or point anything out but for a minute have a think and decide for yourself if im wrong or right.
Safriz
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i eill give you a dollar for every link you pos here of positive news about pakistan by international media.....there wont be any.
it defies laws of nature that 180 million people got nothing positive in them to be reported by media.
Observer7
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- Jul 6, 2011
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Instead of covertly spending of hard earned income on organisations like LET and JEM, Pakistan Govt could spend the amount wisely on the welfare of the poor and their upliftment. It seems Pakistan is now becoming another Bangladesh where it is frequently affected by floods.
I think that western press has ulterior motives. They are often put an anti pakistani antimuslim sheen to their articles. if you were on the recieving end it would be obvious to you as it is to me
Observer7
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Why to Blame the West. When in most the cases Pakistan is involved in some or the other way. Various countries around the world are suffering from Terrorism. And eventually they find yet another Pakistani or some Muslim terrorist behind it. But despite all the info provided to Pak, its Govt lacks the will to crack down those behind it in an honest manner. Even in the case of OBL. How is it possible that the most wanted OBL was living for almost 10 years in the center of the country without the knowledge of the country. This all events put fingers to Pak about its credibility to fight against terrorism.
Safriz
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go throw a party then....you sound so happy...shame on you.
VCheng
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from: http://www.dawn.com/2011/09/18/rain-rain-go-away-2.html
Rain, rain, go away…’
Ardeshir Cowasjee
(16 hours ago) Today
“If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain,” sang Dolly Parton. But that was before the days of escalating climate change.
Today, the opening up of the skies only leads to chaos and gloom the world over, especially in rapidly growing, massively crowded cities in developing countries.
Rain has been falling on what is now 3,500-plus square kilometres of Karachi ever since this planet emerged about 4.5 billion years ago. As part of this hydrologic cycle, the sun heats and evaporates water in oceans, plants and soil. The rising vapour cools and condenses into clouds. Rain and snow precipitates, falling back onto land and sea.
On land, the rainwater flows as surface runoff, eventually snaking into nallahs and rivers. Some runoff soaks into the ground and replenishes aquifers. Over time, the water returns to the ocean, where the water cycle restarts.
This repetitive action over billions of years has established paths and routes for rainfall, cutting ravines, gullies, channels and rivers which quickly drain water from the land surface.
Until 200 years ago, rainwater flooding was not a problem in Karachi. In 1800, the fishing village in Talpur jurisdiction had less than 8,000 inhabitants, increasing to around 17,000 in 1850 under the British, and then to 116,000 at the century’s turn.
The emergence of Pakistan in 1947 saw Karachi with some 400,000 residents, exploding to 1.1 million by 1951 and to some 16 million today. During this period, administrators and citizens have progressively destroyed the natural storm-drain system (evolved over 4.5 billion years), creating all sorts of barriers to the established flow.
What do sane societies do? When a habitation emerges, the elders or planners are aware that the natural slope of the land must not be disturbed. Rainwater that falls on buildings is led to ground level, and then moves along the slope of the land to the road which acts as a minor collector of storm-water.
Construction is carefully controlled by establishing a convex curve (camber) across the road width (with a central high point) and shallow drains along the two sides near the pedestrian sidewalk, sloped along the length of the road in the general direction of the nearest storm-drain. The primary function of roads being traffic movement, the drainage function is subservient and cannot interfere with traffic function.
Minor roads drain into larger roads, which act as intermediate or major collectors, before emptying into storm-drains established in natural channels that have been carved out over millennia. A network of nallahs joins rivers and finally meets the sea.
To repeat, in sane societies, the use, levels and slopes of plots, roads, storm-drains and components of the layout of a city are carefully controlled by the municipality. Large swaths of land are left unpaved so that rainfall can seep into the ground. No one is allowed to raise the level of any land, erect any impediment to water flow, construct roads without camber and side drains, or obstruct a ravine or gully.
The requirements of the storm-drain master plan are strictly enforced by the building control authority, the urban-planning bureau, the road construction department, the anti-encroachment cell and other related municipal agencies. So when it rains, the water flows away and there is no flooding.
We do exactly the opposite in Pakistan’s urban conglomerations. We fill and raise plot levels at will, make buildings with high plinths, erect walls, disregard natural land slopes, construct/repair roads by piling additional material on top of old surfaces (instead of removing the excess), have no camber or side drains in streets, encroach with katchi abadis on nallahs, constrict marine outfalls, and other similar lunacies.
We utilise our storm-drain channels for sewerage, thereby robbing them of the capacity to cope with rainfall. Forgetting that ‘safai nisf iman hey’ (cleanliness is half of faith), we clog the drains with garbage and rubbish. We do not devise storm-drain master plans, and even if we did, do not have the will to enforce them.
As a result of this gross stupidity, two inches of rain paralyses Karachi (or Hyderabad, or Lahore or Faisalabad), with residents dying in collapsing dangerous structures and many more electrocuted by fallen wires.
Low-lying areas are inundated, adding to the miseries of the poor. Traffic on arteries is clogged (affording armed muggers hapless sheep for the slaughter), and scarce electricity supply disappears for days on end; in short, mayhem reigns. To call this a ‘natural disaster is a blatant untruth: it is a ‘man-made disaster’ orchestrated by the government and municipal authorities.
The spine of Karachi, Sharea Faisal, over the past 60 years has been raised four feet above the level of the 150-year old Christian graveyard, turning it into a quagmire. The military offices of the same era on this major artery lie some three feet below road level, all subject to flooding.
Last Tuesday, in Karachi, the chief justice of Pakistan clambered from one vehicle to another amidst floodwaters outside the Supreme Court building to get to the suo motu hearing on Karachi’s violence: in his chambers he dressed down the city district coordination officer who promptly suspended the senior-most officials of the municipal services department for not cleaning up the storm-drain. Problem solved?
The recent colossal rain damage in the rural areas of Sindh, caused by defectively planned drainage systems and canal breaches merits separate, rough, treatment.
With global warming, the rainfall situation is worsening and cannot be wished away. Can we not develop — and implement — sensible storm-drain master plans in our cities? Does the stupendous cost of damage to lives, property and business not make this imperative?
arfc@cyber.net.pk
Rain, rain, go away…’
Ardeshir Cowasjee
(16 hours ago) Today
“If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain,” sang Dolly Parton. But that was before the days of escalating climate change.
Today, the opening up of the skies only leads to chaos and gloom the world over, especially in rapidly growing, massively crowded cities in developing countries.
Rain has been falling on what is now 3,500-plus square kilometres of Karachi ever since this planet emerged about 4.5 billion years ago. As part of this hydrologic cycle, the sun heats and evaporates water in oceans, plants and soil. The rising vapour cools and condenses into clouds. Rain and snow precipitates, falling back onto land and sea.
On land, the rainwater flows as surface runoff, eventually snaking into nallahs and rivers. Some runoff soaks into the ground and replenishes aquifers. Over time, the water returns to the ocean, where the water cycle restarts.
This repetitive action over billions of years has established paths and routes for rainfall, cutting ravines, gullies, channels and rivers which quickly drain water from the land surface.
Until 200 years ago, rainwater flooding was not a problem in Karachi. In 1800, the fishing village in Talpur jurisdiction had less than 8,000 inhabitants, increasing to around 17,000 in 1850 under the British, and then to 116,000 at the century’s turn.
The emergence of Pakistan in 1947 saw Karachi with some 400,000 residents, exploding to 1.1 million by 1951 and to some 16 million today. During this period, administrators and citizens have progressively destroyed the natural storm-drain system (evolved over 4.5 billion years), creating all sorts of barriers to the established flow.
What do sane societies do? When a habitation emerges, the elders or planners are aware that the natural slope of the land must not be disturbed. Rainwater that falls on buildings is led to ground level, and then moves along the slope of the land to the road which acts as a minor collector of storm-water.
Construction is carefully controlled by establishing a convex curve (camber) across the road width (with a central high point) and shallow drains along the two sides near the pedestrian sidewalk, sloped along the length of the road in the general direction of the nearest storm-drain. The primary function of roads being traffic movement, the drainage function is subservient and cannot interfere with traffic function.
Minor roads drain into larger roads, which act as intermediate or major collectors, before emptying into storm-drains established in natural channels that have been carved out over millennia. A network of nallahs joins rivers and finally meets the sea.
To repeat, in sane societies, the use, levels and slopes of plots, roads, storm-drains and components of the layout of a city are carefully controlled by the municipality. Large swaths of land are left unpaved so that rainfall can seep into the ground. No one is allowed to raise the level of any land, erect any impediment to water flow, construct roads without camber and side drains, or obstruct a ravine or gully.
The requirements of the storm-drain master plan are strictly enforced by the building control authority, the urban-planning bureau, the road construction department, the anti-encroachment cell and other related municipal agencies. So when it rains, the water flows away and there is no flooding.
We do exactly the opposite in Pakistan’s urban conglomerations. We fill and raise plot levels at will, make buildings with high plinths, erect walls, disregard natural land slopes, construct/repair roads by piling additional material on top of old surfaces (instead of removing the excess), have no camber or side drains in streets, encroach with katchi abadis on nallahs, constrict marine outfalls, and other similar lunacies.
We utilise our storm-drain channels for sewerage, thereby robbing them of the capacity to cope with rainfall. Forgetting that ‘safai nisf iman hey’ (cleanliness is half of faith), we clog the drains with garbage and rubbish. We do not devise storm-drain master plans, and even if we did, do not have the will to enforce them.
As a result of this gross stupidity, two inches of rain paralyses Karachi (or Hyderabad, or Lahore or Faisalabad), with residents dying in collapsing dangerous structures and many more electrocuted by fallen wires.
Low-lying areas are inundated, adding to the miseries of the poor. Traffic on arteries is clogged (affording armed muggers hapless sheep for the slaughter), and scarce electricity supply disappears for days on end; in short, mayhem reigns. To call this a ‘natural disaster is a blatant untruth: it is a ‘man-made disaster’ orchestrated by the government and municipal authorities.
The spine of Karachi, Sharea Faisal, over the past 60 years has been raised four feet above the level of the 150-year old Christian graveyard, turning it into a quagmire. The military offices of the same era on this major artery lie some three feet below road level, all subject to flooding.
Last Tuesday, in Karachi, the chief justice of Pakistan clambered from one vehicle to another amidst floodwaters outside the Supreme Court building to get to the suo motu hearing on Karachi’s violence: in his chambers he dressed down the city district coordination officer who promptly suspended the senior-most officials of the municipal services department for not cleaning up the storm-drain. Problem solved?
The recent colossal rain damage in the rural areas of Sindh, caused by defectively planned drainage systems and canal breaches merits separate, rough, treatment.
With global warming, the rainfall situation is worsening and cannot be wished away. Can we not develop — and implement — sensible storm-drain master plans in our cities? Does the stupendous cost of damage to lives, property and business not make this imperative?
arfc@cyber.net.pk
VCheng
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from: Rs5bn raised last year still lying unused | Newspaper | DAWN.COM
ISLAMABAD: The government, through the United Nations, has launched an appeal for $356 million international assistance for the people of rain- and flood-affected areas despite the fact that it has not utilised Rs5 billion collected for flood victims last year.
According to sources, the fund set up for collecting donations last year still has Rs5 billion and despite efforts made by the National Disaster Management Authority the government is reluctant to release the amount for relief and rescue operation.
Bureaucratic hitches are said to be the main reason behind non-utilisation of the funds.
When contacted, former NDMA chairman Gen (retd) Nadeem Ahmed confirmed that an amount of Rs5 billion not used so far was lying with the government and because of bureaucratic hitches it was not being provided to the authority to expedite its operation in the affected areas.
“I brought the issue to the knowledge of decision-makers but the funds were not released,” he said.
The government, the NDMA and the UN launched an appeal to the international community, on Sunday, seeking $33.2 million as rapid response to the disaster so that the money could be spent on water and sanitation, food and shelter.
An official said the funds collected earlier had not been released because disaster management had become a provincial subject after the 18th Amendment.
According to official figures, more than eight million people have been affected by the heavy monsoon rains and the death toll has reached 250.
Meanwhile, the Speaker of the National Assembly has written a letter to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani suggesting that the NDMA should be wrapped up because of what she called its ‘poor response’ to rescue and rehabilitation needs in Sindh.
Dr Fehmida Mirza said the NDMA had not reached the flood-hit areas even a month after the disaster. “The NDMA is earning a bad name for the government and, therefore, it should be wrapped up,” she said.
She said people in the affected areas were not blaming the NDMA but the political leaders for their plight.
Mr Gilani also expressed dissatisfaction over the performance of the NDMA and lashed out at its chief during a visit to Nawabshah on Friday.
However, a source in the NDMA said Gen (retd) Nadeem had told the speaker during a meeting last year that funds were available with the government and should be spent to provide relief to people.
NDMA spokesman Irshad Bhatti said the authority was not ready to cope with the disaster this year because the meteorological department had forecast 10 per cent less rains in Sindh. “And some of the districts hit by the floods were not
mentioned in the forecast.”
The spokesman agreed that the government had made a delayed call to the international community for help and said the
NDMA had provided the help it could. “We have provided 150,000 tents, 150,000 water treatment tablets, 60,000 mosquito tents and two water treatment plants to each affected district,” he said.
He said it was not the responsibility of the provincial governments and PDMAs to provide rescue and relief goods to the affected people.
“The basic duty of the NDMA is to coordinate among different stakeholders like NGOs, philanthropists and foreign donors to generate funds and their utilisation is the responsibility of the PDMAs,” the spokesman said.
Another NDMA official said that after last year’s floods some protection measures had been suggested, including raising the canal embankments at an estimated cost of Rs48 million but it had not been done and now the government had spent over Rs2 billion on rescue and relief work.
Had the suggested measures been taken, the destruction caused by the current floods could have been minimised, he said.
The official said a fund set up by Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority for the victims of the 2005 earthquake also had Rs800 million which is not being used to help the flood-affected people.
ISLAMABAD: The government, through the United Nations, has launched an appeal for $356 million international assistance for the people of rain- and flood-affected areas despite the fact that it has not utilised Rs5 billion collected for flood victims last year.
According to sources, the fund set up for collecting donations last year still has Rs5 billion and despite efforts made by the National Disaster Management Authority the government is reluctant to release the amount for relief and rescue operation.
Bureaucratic hitches are said to be the main reason behind non-utilisation of the funds.
When contacted, former NDMA chairman Gen (retd) Nadeem Ahmed confirmed that an amount of Rs5 billion not used so far was lying with the government and because of bureaucratic hitches it was not being provided to the authority to expedite its operation in the affected areas.
“I brought the issue to the knowledge of decision-makers but the funds were not released,” he said.
The government, the NDMA and the UN launched an appeal to the international community, on Sunday, seeking $33.2 million as rapid response to the disaster so that the money could be spent on water and sanitation, food and shelter.
An official said the funds collected earlier had not been released because disaster management had become a provincial subject after the 18th Amendment.
According to official figures, more than eight million people have been affected by the heavy monsoon rains and the death toll has reached 250.
Meanwhile, the Speaker of the National Assembly has written a letter to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani suggesting that the NDMA should be wrapped up because of what she called its ‘poor response’ to rescue and rehabilitation needs in Sindh.
Dr Fehmida Mirza said the NDMA had not reached the flood-hit areas even a month after the disaster. “The NDMA is earning a bad name for the government and, therefore, it should be wrapped up,” she said.
She said people in the affected areas were not blaming the NDMA but the political leaders for their plight.
Mr Gilani also expressed dissatisfaction over the performance of the NDMA and lashed out at its chief during a visit to Nawabshah on Friday.
However, a source in the NDMA said Gen (retd) Nadeem had told the speaker during a meeting last year that funds were available with the government and should be spent to provide relief to people.
NDMA spokesman Irshad Bhatti said the authority was not ready to cope with the disaster this year because the meteorological department had forecast 10 per cent less rains in Sindh. “And some of the districts hit by the floods were not
mentioned in the forecast.”
The spokesman agreed that the government had made a delayed call to the international community for help and said the
NDMA had provided the help it could. “We have provided 150,000 tents, 150,000 water treatment tablets, 60,000 mosquito tents and two water treatment plants to each affected district,” he said.
He said it was not the responsibility of the provincial governments and PDMAs to provide rescue and relief goods to the affected people.
“The basic duty of the NDMA is to coordinate among different stakeholders like NGOs, philanthropists and foreign donors to generate funds and their utilisation is the responsibility of the PDMAs,” the spokesman said.
Another NDMA official said that after last year’s floods some protection measures had been suggested, including raising the canal embankments at an estimated cost of Rs48 million but it had not been done and now the government had spent over Rs2 billion on rescue and relief work.
Had the suggested measures been taken, the destruction caused by the current floods could have been minimised, he said.
The official said a fund set up by Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority for the victims of the 2005 earthquake also had Rs800 million which is not being used to help the flood-affected people.
Observer7
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I am not happy. Even no body could be happy. Its the only mistake of GOP and its people. Where people have forgotten what they actually want. After getting the independence Pakistan has never focused on its poor people nor on its welfare. Instead GOP started to compete India in militarily and diverted the prime issue with a stupid cause of gaining Kashmir. In return what it got. Neither Kashmir nor peace in its own country. Its people, army, intelligence gone astray. Without proper planning it gone for to involve them self with Afgan war and got a never ending headache of terrorist organisation and its own people becoming hostile towards the state or country. It seems that more that 30000 people have died in all these years and still counting. So many lives lost why the people still don't recognize that there is no fate in hatred and war.
Thanks for this VCheng. It shows a lack of infrastructure in the heart of the Pakistani establishment in not being able to organize this. Perhaps the sad state of affairs suggests not only aid is required but people to supervise the usage and distribution of this aid before it either goes astray or is not used in preventing this again
VCheng
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Exactly correct. Having money is only one step in a total program of support, but the elite just concentrate on the money part to misuse for their own needs, while the real disaster goes unchecked. NGOs would be one way to bypass this government-sanctioned looting, but the "establishment" wants to lock down the NGOs for this very reason.
Perhaps supervision with the $$ which is sad as im suggesting the funds would be misused if left in their hands. They have no self respect mate. 1st call their pocket, 2nd port of call the public
VCheng
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The damage done to Pakistan's reputation by the circus surrounding Angelina Jolie's visit is immense behind the scenes. Now people openly ask why money should be donated if all it is going to be used for is the lavish lifestyle of the rich in Pakistan and building nuclear weapons and madrassas; at least those are the impressions created.
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