By Aflatoon
I want to put two documents beside each other.
The first is the Meteorological Department’s advisory, issued on Tuesday. It forecasts rain from the twenty-ninth of July to the fifth of August. It names, individually, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Murree, Galliyat, Attock, Chakwal, Jhelum, Mandi Bahauddin, Gujrat, Gujranwala, Hafizabad, Wazirabad and Sialkot. Then it names eighteen more districts. Then twelve more in the south, with a different date range. Then Sindh, in two groups, with a third date range. It distinguishes between “scattered heavy falls” and “at times very heavy rainfall”. It explains that monsoon currents from the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal will meet a westerly wave that strengthens from the first of August.
It is, genuinely, an impressive document. Somebody understands the atmosphere over this country very well.
The second is a sentence from a thirty-two-year-old woman named Iqra Salman, in a village in Punjab:
“It has been four days, and no rescue team has reached us.”
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I do not think these two documents contradict each other. I think they describe the same state, doing two different things, at two very different levels of competence.
We are extremely good at knowing. We are considerably worse at going.
The knowing is centralised, technical, staffed by people with instruments, and it produces a text. The going requires a boat, a driver, fuel, a road that still exists, and somebody whose job it is to be in that particular village on that particular day. The first is a national capability. The second is a local one. We have invested in the first.
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Who reached her, in the end?
Volunteers. A man named Haris Dar, standing next to what the report calls a lake-like body of brown water, with four boats, working across around a dozen villages.
Four boats. A dozen villages.
I want to be careful not to turn Haris Dar into a moral. Volunteers rescuing their neighbours is not a scandal; it is what decent people do, and it happens in every flood in every country. The scandal, if there is one, is not that volunteers came. It is that four days passed and they were still the ones who came.
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One hundred and nine people have died since the twenty-sixth of June. Around a third in Punjab.
I wrote a fortnight ago — well, two days ago, though it feels longer — about how most of these deaths are houses falling down rather than people being swept away. That remains true and remains the deeper problem. But there is a second problem sitting on top of it, and this week has made it legible.
When the house falls, or the water rises, the interval between the event and the arrival of help is where the death happens. Not the rain. The interval.
And the interval is not a technical mystery. It is a function of how many boats are pre-positioned where, how quickly a district administration can be made to move, and whether anyone with authority is measuring the time from call to contact. I have not seen that number published. I do not think it is collected.
We publish the death toll. We publish the rainfall. We do not publish the response time, and so nobody is accountable for it, and so it does not improve.
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The rain returns tomorrow. The advisory says so, in detail, district by district, with dates.
Iqra Salman’s village will be in one of those districts. Somebody in Islamabad already knows which one.
That is the part I cannot get past. This is not a failure of information. Everybody involved has the information. The forecast was correct, the districts were named, the warning was issued, and a woman still sat surrounded by water for four days with no electricity, no clean water and no food, while the state that produced the forecast did not produce a boat.
Knowing where the water will be is not the same as being there when it arrives.
We keep mistaking the first for the second.
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Aflatoon is a satirist and observer of the Pakistani condition. His column, Intellectual Voices, appears in The Pakistan Daily.
