by Fazal Saadi
The sky tore open, and hell poured out in Gilgit-Baltistan’s Ghizer District. What followed was an avalanche of water and fury, sweeping away all in its path—boulders, bridges, homes, orchards, and houses of worship.
On July 30th and August 14th, the floods transformed the Ishkoman Valley’s tranquil mountain slops into a conduit for catastrophe. The calamity was not merely rain; it was a churning, black torrent of absolute devastation that swallowed the landscape, severing communities and erasing the very fabric of life in a single, roaring blow.
According to initial estimates, in Dain village the floods reduced 41 houses to rubble and left 28 in a shamble; in Chatorkhand, the main town of the tehsil, the fury damaged six homes completely, and two more partially beyond repair. In Asumbar village, six houses were razed to ground, one left clinging to its foundations. In total, 53 houses were destroyed, 49 partially damaged, 65 inundated, and 18 shops swept away.
The sudden collapse of the 612-foot Dain–Chatorkhand bridge, a structure that had stood for four decades, severed a lifeline for over 5,000 residents. The human toll was severe: two dead, five injured, and dozens of families displaced. But its devastation extended far beyond immediate casualties. Critical community facilities were shattered. Two schools were badly damaged, while a mosque and a Jamaat Khana were completely destroyed; infrastructure lay in ruins; roads, irrigation channels, as well as power and water lines were severed.
The floodwaters also ravaged the agricultural heart of the community, sweeping away livestock and ruining thousands of kanals of orchards and cropland, severing both irrigation and livelihood in a single blow, leaving the community isolated and its future uncertain.
Conservative estimates put the economic loss between PKR 870 million and PKR 1.2 billion (USD 3.1–4.2 million), with recovery costs close to PKR 1.8 billion (USD 6.4 million). Yet behind these figures lies an even deeper story: a region whose resilience has been steadily eroded.
For generations, the people of Gilgit-Baltistan have lived in the formidable embrace of their mountains. The region is home to some of the world’s largest glaciers outside the polar regions. They are the “water towers” of South Asia, feeding the Indus River system. The glaciers are melting faster, destabilising slopes and swelling lakes. As glaciers retreat, they leave behind unstable meltwater lakes dammed by ice or moraine. These dams can breach catastrophically, sending colossal walls of water, ice, and debris down valleys.
Cloudbursts and GLOFs, once a rare geological event, are now a frequent, seasonal threat. Although climate change is the major cause of the current catastrophe, its impacts are augmented by human negligence. Growing population, unregulated land use, and unplanned construction of hotels and houses, fertile valleys, once reserved for crops, are being consumed by tourism projects, leaving villages exposed to disasters. This directly increases landslide risk in the wake of a cloudburst. Deforestation and overgrazing are other reasons that weaken natural buffers.
Meanwhile, poorly planned roads and infrastructure, often built without regard for mountain ecology, and communities concerns, are destroyed again and again by floods and landslides. Each disaster strips away what little resilience remains.
Four decades ago, the people of Gilgit-Baltistan lived in a largely egalitarian and self-sufficient society with little dependence on cash or external markets. Families sustained themselves by growing their own wheat, barley, and potatoes; raising goats and cows for milk and manure; and spinning wool from their sheep into warm clothing. They wove goat wool into carpets known locally as sharma.
The economy operated on barter, with communities exchanging food, firewood, and services. Nothing was wasted. Animal dung became fuel, crop residues were turned into compost, and old timber was repurposed for new barns. This resilience meant that even when winter roads were blocked, families remained food-secure, and communities relied on each other rather than distant markets.
This system was fundamentally altered by the arrival of new roads and an influx of non-customs-paid vehicles, which flooded the region with substandard and often hazardous goods from down-country cities and across the Chinese border. Local produce was displaced by cheap, imported vegetables and poultry.
Traditional materials like wool and wood were replaced by plastic. Furthermore, agricultural land once dedicated to diverse food crops was converted to cash crop of cherries and potatoes, grown primarily for export to distant markets rather than local consumption.
What economists now call the “circular economy” was once simply a way of life here. Life was not easy but was sustainable, resource-efficient, and above all resilient. Today, households that once produced almost everything they needed are now heavily dependent on volatile outside markets for their food, clothing, and even basic tools.
Illusion of neoliberal development
The floods that tore through the valleys of Gilgit-Baltistan washed away not just roads and bridges, but the illusion that neoliberal development could ever be enough for these fragile mountains. The response cannot be a simple act of replacement. True rebuilding demands a deeper resilience, woven from the threads of climate-smart planning and the enduring wisdom of circular living that once defined life in the high mountains.
This journey of resilient recovery begins with governance. The first step is to restore and empower local government system suspended for 20 years, putting elected representatives in charge of planning and disaster risk reduction. This shift from centralized control to community-driven leadership is the essential foundation for everything that follows.
With accountable leadership in place, we can confront the most pressing need. Gilgit-Baltistan urgently requires a comprehensive land use policy. We must use hazard mapping to clearly define no-build zones, reform tenure, and design infrastructure for mountain realities, not copy-paste designs from the plains.
Tourism, a vital source of income, and contributor to pollution, must be regulated and linked to the region’s carrying capacity. Our fragile ecosystem cannot sustain endless growth; we must align our settlement patterns with environmental limits.
This deliberate reordering of our relationship with the land unlocks the potential for a transformative revival of our local systems. Imagine villages no longer solely dependent on food trucks that can be halted by a landslide, but instead reviving their own food sovereignty, producing and consuming their own staples.
We must actively reforest the degraded slopes that failed to hold the waters, regulate grazing, and fiercely protect our most fertile land from the relentless spread of concrete. This ecosystem restoration is the vital work of rebuilding our natural infrastructure, our first and best defence against future disasters.
The spirit of this renewal must be community. By encouraging bartering, pooling surpluses, and forming collective enterprises, we can shield households from volatility and build an economy rooted in solidarity, not just individual gain.
The floods in Gilgit-Baltistan are a grim reminder of a future shaped by climate change. They offer us a stark choice: we can rebuild as we were, and wait for the next tragedy, or we can seize this opportunity to rethink development entirely. We can choose to rebuild resilience not only with cement and steel, but with indigenous culture, knowledge, and self-reliance.
If Gilgit-Baltistan can blend modern planning with traditional wisdom, it can endure. If it fails, the cost will not just be counted in billions of rupees, but in uprooted lives and erased communities—mountain societies reduced to entries in history books. The choice is ours.
Fazal Saadi from Ishkoman is a development practitioner and researcher whose work focuses on the poverty and inequality challenges generated by development processes.
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