Since June, Pakistan has experienced yet another season of severe monsoon flooding, with particularly heavy impacts across the Punjab region. Flood waters and landslides have claimed many hundreds of lives and displaced hundreds of thousands more. The Pakistan Disaster Management Authority announced that, by 10 September, that 900 people had died and about four million were impacted by the floods.

The 2025 floods mark the third major event in the past 15 years – following the catastrophic flooding of 2010 and 2022. Climate change-induced weather phenomena are making extreme rainfall more common. But there is also unplanned development and dam mismanagement that are turning these extreme events into disasters.

In this episode of State of Southasia, Daanish Mustafa, a professor of critical geography and an expert on hydropolitics talks to Nayantara Narayanan about how climatic variability, unregulated development, and colonial water governance intersect to exacerbate Pakistan and other Southasian countries’ vulnerabilities to floods. Mustafa questions planning paradigms that rely on statistical "normality" and outdated colonial models and advocates for a shift toward participatory, democratic forms of environmental governance, grounded in local knowledge systems, social equity, and an understanding of water as both an ecological and cultural entity.

You can also listen to this episode on:

🎧 YouTube: https://youtu.be/_6rWl2S8yxM

🎧 Apple podcasts: https://apple.co/3WboIQn

Episode notes:

Daanish Mustafa’s recommendations:

The disastrous redesign of Pakistan’s rivers - Vox (video)

The Indus Rivers: A Study of the Effects of Partition - Aloys Arthur Michel (non-fiction)

Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India - Rohan D’Souza (non-fiction)

Further reading from Himal’s archives:

Pakistan loses nothing from India’s suspension of the Indus Waters

TreatyUnpacking the floods in PakistanManaging floods in

BangladeshExplainer: Why embankments won’t solve Nepal’s flood woesIs

Kerala’s pokkali the rice of the future? 

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