Japan will provide 2.58 billion yen, about $16.4 million, to strengthen embankments on the Indus in Sindh (Dawn).
What it funds
The Project for Flood Protection and Dike Improvement, targeting the Old Abad Bund in Larkana on the right bank of the Indus, “targeting enhanced climate resilience for high-risk communities.”
Who signed
The agreement was formalised at the Ministry of Economic Affairs on Tuesday by Japanese Ambassador Akamatsu Shuichi, Economic Affairs Secretary Mohammad Humair Karim Kidwai, and JICA Senior Representative Sugawara Takayuki.
Why Larkana, and why the right bank
Because that is where it broke. The right bank of the Indus through upper Sindh is the stretch where the 2010 and 2022 floods inundated the largest areas, and Larkana district sits in the path water takes when a bund fails upstream.
Embankment work is unglamorous and specific: it does not stop a flood, it determines where the water goes when one arrives.
The proportion
$16.4m is a single bund. Sindh’s 2022 flood damage ran into billions of dollars, and the reconstruction framework agreed after it was never fully funded.
That is not a criticism of the grant, which does a defined thing at a defined place. It is a note on scale: this is one repair on one bank of one river, in a province where the same river has overtopped its defences twice in fifteen years.
What is not established
No completion date has been published, and no figure for how many people the Old Abad Bund protects.
[Image: INP via Dawn]
