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Habibullah Khatti, a local resident, prays at his mother's grave before abandoning Abdullah Mirbahar village in Kharo Chan town, in the Indus delta on June 25, 2025. — AFP
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Khro Chen: Salt slips into the feet under the stones of the salt when Habibullah Khatti fell to his mother’s grave to say a last farewell to his last farewell to abandon the village of his standing island on the Indus Delta.
The intervention of seawater in the Delta, where the Indus River meets the Arabian Sea in the south of the country, has given rise to the elimination of farming and fishing communities.
“Salty water has surrounded us from all four sides,” Khatti told AFP from Abdullah Marbhar village in the city of Kharu Chen, 15 km (9 miles), now from Khatti Chen, where the river is empty in the sea.
As the fish stocks fell, the 54 -year -old man turned to the tailor until it became impossible, only four of the 150 households were left. “In the evening, a wonderful silence occupies the area,” he said, “when wandering dogs were roaming in deserted wood and bamboo houses.
About 40 villages were once included in Khar Chen, but most have disappeared under seawater. According to the census data, the population of the town decreased from 26,000 in 1981 to 11,000 in 2023.
Khatti is preparing to move its family to the largest city in Karachi, Pakistan, and swelling with an economic immigrant, including the Sindh Delta.
Pakistan Fisher Folic Forum, which supports fishing communities, estimates that tens of thousands of people have been displaced from the coastal districts of the Delta.
However, more than 1.2 million people have been displaced from the Indus Delta region in the past two decades, according to a research published by a former minister of climate change in March, according to a research tank, Jinnah Institute.
According to a 2018 study by the American Pakistan Center for modern water studies, the effects of irrigation canals, hydroelectric dams and snowfall and snow melting have decreased by 80 % since the 1950s.
This caused the seawater destructive.
Since 1990, water salts have increased by about 70 %, making it impossible to grow crops and severely affect the population of shrimp and shrimp.
“The Delta is drowning and shrinking,” said Mohammad Ali Anjum, a local WWF local reservoir.
Rising level of water
Since starting from Tibet, the Indus River flows from Kashmir before crossing the entire length of Pakistan. The river and its assistants irrigate 80 % of the country’s fields, which support millions of livelihoods.
The Delta, which was formed by the rich sesame seeds, when it meets the sea, was once ideal for farming, fishing, mangrove and wildlife.
A government water agency study in 2019 revealed that more than 16 % of fertile land has become non -productive due to seawater encroachment.
In the town of Katie Monkey, which spreads from the water edge, a white layer of salt crystals covers the ground. The boats carry water to drink from miles, and the villagers make it a house with donkeys.
“Who leaves his homeland with joy?” Haji Karam Jat said, whose house was swallowed by a growing water level.
It rebuilt the domestic area, expecting that more and more families would be added to it.
He told AFP, “A man only leaves his homeland when he has no choice.”
Lose the way of life lost
The British colonial rulers were the first person to change the river Indus with the Indus and Dams, recently, after that dozens of hydropower projects followed by then after that after that, dozens of hydropower projects were followed by the farmers on the river Sindh, the river of Sindh.
To counter the demarcation of the Basin River Indus, the government and the United Nations launched the “Living Indus Initiative” in 2021. An interference focuses on the rehabilitation of the Delta by dealing with soil moisture and protecting local agriculture and ecosystem.
The Sindh government is currently running its mangrove restoration project, which aims to restore the forests acting as a natural barrier to interference in saline water.
Even when mangroves are restored in some parts of the coast, land occupation and residential development projects are cleared in other areas.
Meanwhile, after neighboring India canceled the 1960 water agreement with Pakistan, the river and its Delta posed a threat to a threat that is divided into controlling the Sindh Basin Rivers.
It has threatened that the agreement has ever been threatened to restore and build dams upwards, and by squeezing the flow of water, which has called it a “process of war”.
Fatima Majeed, a climate activist working with the Pakistan Fisher Folic Forum, said that along with her homes, the communities have lost a lifestyle in the delta.
Majid said, especially, whose lives have been sewn from generations to generation and filled the cachs of the day.
He remarked, “We have not lost our land yet, we have lost our culture.”
