Pakistan’s Flood Housing Scams: A Hidden Crisis

 

The floods of 2022 were not just a natural disaster. They were a test. Entire villages went under, millions lost their homes, and the world opened its wallet. Billions in aid, promises of “model housing,” press conferences filled with hope. Yet today, in Sindh and Balochistan, families still sleep under plastic sheets.

The water receded. The betrayal stayed.

Promises That Never Arrived

The government’s reports painted a glowing picture—hundreds of thousands of homes “under construction.” But when you walk through Badin, you see shells. Thin tin sheets nailed together, no toilets, no drainage. Structures already tilting.

In Dadu, a widow named Shazia told journalists she had to pay Rs. 30,000 just to stay on the list. “I lost my home to the flood,” she said. “Now I must pay to get another?”

Numbers hide stories like hers. On the ground, hope has a price tag.

Disaster as Business

Every tragedy in Pakistan births its own market. During COVID, it was fake ventilators and vaccine line-jumping. After the floods, it was housing scams.

• Contractors invoiced for homes never built.

• Local officials deleted names until families bribed them.

• Landlords kept donor-funded houses for their relatives.

Even land meant for new housing became contested ground, sparking disputes between desperate families and entrenched elites.

The Show for Donors

In Islamabad, slideshows tell a different story. Model villages. Fresh paint. Happy families. Donors nod, check boxes, and move on.

But go back to Sindh. Mothers are still tucking children under tarpaulin. The gap is not ignorance—it is complicity.

What Could Work Instead

It doesn’t have to be this way. Look at the Edhi Foundation, which built over 1,200 permanent one-room homes in flood-hit Sindh with verifiable records. Or the Alkhidmat Foundation, which worked with local masons to construct nearly 3,500 brick shelters across Punjab and Sindh—each house photographed, GPS-tagged, and handed to families with receipts.

Women’s groups, too, showed what’s possible. The Thardeep Rural Development Programme (TRDP) in Tharparkar trained women to design low-cost, climate-resilient huts with local materials. In one pilot village, 150 families moved into sturdy shelters—each costing less than half the “official” houses that never appeared.

These projects prove something simple: rebuilding can be honest, if the middlemen are cut out.

But the machine of politics, bureaucracy, and contractors keeps grinding. And it grinds down the poor first.

The Floods Will Return

Pakistan lives in a climate danger zone. More floods will come. The question is whether we will keep repeating the cycle: devastation, pledges, scams, and another round of neglect. Or whether citizens and civil society can finally shame the state into accountability.

Because every unbuilt house is not just corruption. It is humiliation.