Crunching on salt crusts, Habibullah Khatti has come to bid his mother one last farewell in a Pakistani Indus delta village that he is abandoning along with the other 3,000 residents of his parched island village.
Penetration of seawater into the delta at the mouth of River Indus on the Arabian Sea in the southern part of the country has led to collapse of farming and fishing communities.
Khatti told AFP from Abdullah Mirbahar village in the town of Kharo Chan, some 15 kilometres (9 miles) south of where the river meets the sea, that the salty water has encircled them on all sides.
With the decline in fish stocks, the 54 year old resorted to tailoring which also proved impossible when only four out of the 150 households survived.
There is an ominous silence replaced in the night, he maintained, and stray dogs were roaming in the long abandoned deserted wooden and bamboo houses.
Kharo Chan used to consist of about 40 villages, the biggest part of which have been submerged in increasing seawater.
Census data shows that the population of the town declined to 11,000 in 2023 (down 15,000 since 1981).
Khatti is ready to relocate himself and his family to neighbouring Karachi, the biggest city of Pakistan that is full of economic migrants, including Indus delta.
According to the Pakistani fisherfolk group that calls attention to the fishing villages, tens of thousands have lost their land in coastal areas of the delta.
But over a 20-year period, the Indus delta region as a whole has displaced over 1.2 million people, a study published by the Jinnah Institute, a think tank formerly run by an ex-climate change minister, found in March.
A 2018 study by the US-Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies in Water noted that the 80 percent downstream flowing of the water into the delta has declined since the 1950s due to irrigation canals, hydropower dams as well as the effects of climate change with glaciers and snow melt.
That has caused catastrophic water intrusion into the sea.
The water has become around 70 percent saltier since 1990 which has rendered cultivation of any crops impossible and has caused great harm to the crab and shrimps population.
Muhammad Ali Anjum, a local WWF conservationist, said the delta is sinking as well as shrinking.
Situation of Indus Delta Leaves No Other Option
The Indus River originates in Tibet then it flows through Kashmir before it flows the entire length of Pakistan.
Approximately 80 percent of farming in the country is irrigated by the river and its tributaries which supply livelihoods to millions of people.
It used to comprise a delta that was suitable to farming, fishing, mangroves and wildlife as it was made of rich sediment deposited by the river at the edge of the sea.
However, sea encroachment has rendered more than 16 percent of arable land unproductive since 2019 when this was discovered by a government water agency.
A white film of salt crystals are on the ground in the town of Keti Bandar which expands inland on the edge of the water.
Drinkable water is ferried in using boats several miles and transported home by villagers using donkeys.
Who ever wants to leave his country? said Haji Karam Jat, in whose house the rising water level had consumed.
Farther inland he rebuilt expecting that more families would join him.
Only those left without another option leave their motherland, he told AFP.
Life style
The making of the Indus River is not a recent development as the British colonialists were the initial ones to modify the flow of the river through canals and dams, and more recently, through hundreds of hydropower projects.
Last early this year there was a halt in various canal projects on the Indus River led by the military after farmers in low-lying riverine Sindh province took to the streets.
To fight the pollution of the Indus River Basin, the United Nations, in partnership with the government, introduced the Living Indus Initiative in 2021.
There is an intervention work on restoring the delta as it requires the problem of the soil salinity and safeguarding the local agriculture and environments.
Sindh government has its own mangrove restoration project in the works at the moment, which is seeking to recreate forests as a natural defense against the sea level rise.
Land grabbing and residential development projects are clearings, even as mangroves get rejuvenated in some places along the coastline.
The neighbouring India has an imminent threat on the river and its delta as it has abrogated a 1960 water treaty with Pakistan that shared control over Indus basin rivers.
It has even threatened never to restore the treaty and construct dams on the upstream side making no space in any way to pass the water to Pakistan that has termed it as an act of war.
The communities have also lost a livelihood closely intertwined with the delta along with their home, said climate activist Fatima Majeed, who is part of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum.
Specifically, women who have spent generations stitching nets and stuffing the day catches find it difficult to get work when they move to the cities, said Majeed, whose grandfather moved the family out of Kharo Chan to the outskirts of Karachi.
We do not only lose our land, but also our culture.
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