The United Nations and other international organisations involved in emergency relief work in the flooded areas of Pakistan are facing dire shortage of funds since the most recent floods struck the southern parts of the country. No news of any significant domestic contributions to the assistance of the flood victims has been heard however. If parallels between international assistance this year and that of the previous year are drawn, the former is almost nominal this time. One may come up with an explanation for the slow international funding this year and blame world politics, Pak-US relations or contending priorities of the international donors.
Last year, domestic assistance, apart from the international aid, was in abundance. However this year local response is minimal, forcing one to ask why local actors have not been as actively involved in the relief and rescue efforts as they had been last year or why fellow Pakistanis too seemed less generous this year. Why have we not heard the amount of aid the Prime Minister Fund has received?
The parallels also suggest that the floods during last year affected vast areas which included the provinces of Punjab and Khyber Pukhtunkhwa also. The philanthropists or the generous people actively played their part in all affected areas which created transparency on a much broader scale.
The present scenario is limited to the southern parts of the country only and philanthropists from other areas do not have easy access to the flooded parts. The philanthropists of Peshawar cannot have access to the flood victims of Sindh or Balochistan easily; they can contribute from a distance only in form of cash but there is no transparent system available to a Peshawar-based person. He will not give his hard-earned money to any state system fearing it could be embezzled. So, local response, being individual initiative, has certain limitations.
This local response failed to cast any significant impact on the lives of the flood victims as there is no non-state structure which could bind the individuals’ initiative into a system. The trust-deficit between the people and the state largely added up to the misery of the people.
This scenario also heightens the importance of international assistance as it becomes more crucial for the saving of around 9 million lives.
“Even the Senate, which is a vital organ of the parliamentary system, hence of the government, expressed its distrust of the government when its members refused to involve officials in the process of collecting funds, purchasing necessary items from the collected amount and distributing those items among the affected people.
The flood disaster is largely the result of mismanagement and ill-governance and a trust-deficit between the people and the state. Pakistan in this situation cannot deal with the crisis on its own without international assistance. International help is crucial as local or domestic response system is non-existent here in Pakistan,” Dr Akash Ansari, a social worker active in the flooded region of Badin, told Pakistan Today.