According to his office, the declaration was made while Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif was visiting the Sindh district of Jaccobabad on his way to the town of Sohbatput in another province affected by flooding, Baluchistan.
Since mid-June, Pakistan has been hit by enormous monsoon rains and floods that have killed 1,719 people. Floodwaters are now slowly draining in both provinces and other parts of the poor South Asian nation. In Pakistan, more than 500,000 people were residing in tents at one point in August.
A little over 200,000 people, according to Sindh’s disaster management agency, are presently residing in relief camps in the province, where 12 million people have been impacted by the flooding and 780 people have died.
Although authorities estimate that it would take another two months for the water to entirely drain, the Indus River, which was mostly responsible for the destruction in Sindh, is already at normal levels.
In Sindh, where medical professionals have seen 30,000 patients in the last day, skin infections and waterborne illnesses are on the rise, according to the province health department.
Over 2 million homes have been damaged, thousands of kilometres of roads have been washed away, and 435 bridges have been demolished nationwide. The floods have affected 33 million people. There have been 345 women and 641 children altogether among the deaths.
According to a number of experts and government officials, the damage might cost $32 billion.
The United Nations’ humanitarian organisation said over the weekend that 5.5 million people lack access to clean drinking water, while 7 million women, children, and toddlers need food immediately. According to OCHA, 8.2 million people in flood-affected areas required immediate medical attention.
The U.N. Early in October, it increased its request for $160 million to $816 million in order to address the problem.
For his part, Sharif has urged industrialised nations, which experts say have had the greatest influence on climate change, to increase help to his poor Islamic country, where authorities predict that flood survivors will have a hard winter in December.
