By Abdul Adil
London, (The Muslim News): The death toll from floods in Pakistan’s northeastern Punjab province has increased to 30 over the past three days.
Punjab Chief Minister, Maryam Nawaz Sharif, said provincial authorities evacuated hundreds of thousands of people and animals from flooded areas, in what she described as the “biggest evacuation and rescue operation in our history”.
“We are facing a situation we haven’t faced in decades. There has been a continuous effect due to non-stop rainfall,” CM Maryam said. “Our neighbour, India, opened their spillways and all that water came into our rivers, overflowing them.”
“We have evacuated and transported around 600,000 people in Punjab, who were moved from inundated areas. Around 450,000 animals have been evacuated as well.”
The CM added that timely evacuations need to be carried out in districts currently under threat from flooding, such as Jhang, Muzaffargarh, Multan and Okara.
Relief Commissioner Nabeel Javed said more than 2,308 villages across Punjab had been inundated, affecting 1.516 million people. Of these, 481,000 had been evacuated to safer areas.
The provincial administration has set up 511 relief camps providing food and shelter, along with 351 medical camps and 321 veterinary camps. Over 405,000 animals have also been moved to secure locations.
It is for the first time in the country’s 78-year history that the three eastern rivers – Chenab, Ravi, Sutlej – have overflown simultaneously, inundating over 2,000 villages and affecting more than 1.5 million people so far.
Authorities in southern Sindh province have urged the residents living downstream to get ready for mandatory evacuations as the Indus River is likely to flow in high flood next week.
“We have put the people and authorities on high alert as the floodwaters from the three rivers are coming to Indus River,” Jam Khan Shoro, a provincial minister, who is overseeing the relief activities in Sindh, told reporters.
In mid-August, more than 400 Pakistanis were killed in a matter of days by landslides caused by torrential rains on the other side of the country, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, close to Afghanistan and the only province held by the opposition to the federal authorities.
The latest floods are seen as the worst after the 2022 catastrophic deluges that inundated a third of the country, aside from killing over 1,700 people.
[Photo: Pakistani people wade through floodwater as at least 30 people were killed and over 1.5 million affected in massive flooding with hundreds of thousands already evacuated to safer areas in Mandi Bahuddin, Punjab province of Pakistan on August 29, 2025.Photojournalist: Muhammad Reza/AA]
