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LAHORE: Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province is dealing with the biggest flood in its history, a senior official said Sunday, as water levels of rivers rise to all-time highs.
Global warming has worsened monsoon rains this year in Pakistan, one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. Downpours and cloudbursts have triggered flash floods and landslides across the mountainous north and northwest in recent months.
Residents in eastern Punjab have also experienced abnormal amounts of rain, as well as cross-border flooding after India released water from swollen rivers and overflowing dams into Pakistan’s low-lying regions.
The senior minister for the province, Maryam Aurangzeb, told a press conference on Sunday: “This is the biggest flood in the history of the Punjab. The flood has affected two million people. It’s the first time that the three rivers — Sutlej, Chenab, and Ravi — have carried such high levels of water.”
Local authorities are using educational institutions, police, and security facilities as rescue camps, and evacuating people, including by boat, she said.
“The Foreign Ministry is collecting data regarding India’s deliberate release of water into Pakistan,” added Aurangzeb. There was no immediate comment from India.
India alerted its neighbor to the possibility of cross-border flooding last week, the first public diplomatic contact between the two countries since a crisis brought them close to war in May.
Punjab, home to some 150 million people, is a vital part of the country’s agricultural sector and is Pakistan’s main wheat producer. Ferocious flooding in 2022 wiped out huge swaths of crops in the east and south of the country, leading Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to warn that his country faced food shortages.
Figures from Pakistan’s national weather center show that Punjab received 26.5 percent more monsoon rain between July 1 and August 27 compared to the same period last year.
The country’s disaster management authority said 849 people have been killed and 1,130 injured nationwide in rain-related incidents since June 26.
Pakistan’s monsoon season usually runs to the end of September.

SYDNEY: Thousands of Australians joined anti-immigration rallies across the country on Sunday that the center-left government condemned, saying they sought to spread hate and were linked to neo-Nazis.
March for Australia rallies against immigration were held in Sydney and other state capitals and regional centers, according to the group’s website.
“Mass migration has torn at the bonds that held our communities together,” the website says. The group posted on X on Saturday that the rallies aimed to do “what the mainstream politicians never have the courage to do: demand an end to mass immigration.”
The group also says it is concerned about culture, wages, traffic, housing and water supply, environmental destruction, infrastructure, hospitals, crime and loss of community.
Australia – where one in two people is either born overseas or has a parent born overseas – has been grappling with a rise in right-wing extremism, including protests by neo-Nazis.
“We absolutely condemn the March for Australia rally that’s going on today. It is not about increasing social harmony,” Murray Watt, a senior minister in the Labor government, told Sky News television, when asked about the rally in Sydney, the country’s most-populous city.
“We don’t support rallies like this that are about spreading hate and that are about dividing our community,” Watt said, asserting they were “organized and promoted” by neo-Nazi groups.
March for Australia organizers did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the neo-Nazi claims.
Laws banning the Nazi salute and the display or sale of symbols associated with terror groups came into effect in Australia this year in response to a string of antisemitic attacks on synagogues, buildings and cars since the beginning of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023.
Counter-protesters express ‘disgust, anger’
Some 5,000 to 8,000 people, many draped in Australian flags, had assembled for the Sydney rally, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported. It was held near the course of the Sydney Marathon, where 35,000 runners pounded the streets on Sunday, finishing at the city’s Opera House.
Also nearby, a counter-rally by the Refugee Action Coalition, a community activist organization, took place.
“Our event shows the depth of disgust and anger about the far-right agenda of March For Australia,” a coalition spokesperson said in a statement. Organizers said hundreds attended that event.
Police said hundreds of officers were deployed across Sydney in an operation that ended “with no significant incidents.”
A large March for Australia rally was held in central Melbourne, the capital of Victoria state, according to aerial footage from the ABC, which reported that riot officers used pepper spray on demonstrators. Victoria Police did not confirm the report but said it would provide details on the protest later on Sunday.
Bob Katter, the leader of a small populist party, attended a March for Australia rally in Queensland, a party spokesperson said, three days after the veteran lawmaker threatened a reporter for mentioning Katter’s Lebanese heritage at a press conference when the topic of his attendance at a March for Australia event was being discussed.
Katter was “swarmed with hundreds of supporters” at the rally in Townsville, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail reported.
In Sydney, March for Australia protester Glenn Allchin said he wanted a “slowdown” in immigration.
“It’s about our country bursting at the seams and our government bringing more and more people in,” Allchin said. “Our kids struggling to get homes, our hospitals – we have to wait seven hours – our roads, the lack of roads.”