Monsoon Deluge Submerges Karachi: How Poor Infrastructure Exposed the City’s Flood Crisis

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In 2025, Karachi is caught in another monsoon deluge disaster, with vehicles floating in the water and people stranded. Why does the largest city of Pakistan flood annually and what structural solutions are required to adjust its failing infrastructure?

Monsoon Deluge Submerges Karachi: How Poor Infrastructure Exposed the City’s Flood Crisis

Pakistan’s economic and cultural capital, Karachi, has a population of over 20 million people. It forms about 20 percent of the national GDP, and is the pumping heart of commerce, manufactures and money-making. However, this big city of a million people comes to a standstill every single year during monsoon rains.

Karachi remains underwater following a 2025 monsoon downpour that turned significant highways into rivers, severed electricity to millions, and stranded millions of families in their houses. Thousands of videos of flooded cars and urgent requests to be rescued were uploaded on social media—an eerily familiar sight from the 2020 and 2022 floods.

The rainfall this year was not very extraordinary, although very intense. What it revealed was rather the core collapse of infrastructure and absence of urban resilience that is still plaguing the largest city of Pakistan.

Reason Why Karachi floods Every Monsoon

Although the cause of the flooding is heavy rainfall, the causes of urban flooding are anthropogenic (man-made) in the case of Karachi. Metropolitan planners and scholars have emphasized many times the systemic problems that they still have not managed to solve:

  • Blocked Stormwater drains (Nullahs)
  • Karachi possesses approximately 41 big stormwater drains, all of which are blocked with garbage, construction waste, and illegal encroachment.
  • The rain that is intended to drain towards the sea ends up spilling on the roads and into the houses.
  • Inefficient, Wasteful Management
  • Karachi generates close to 16,000 tons of solid waste daily, which is drained in the open drains.
  • The household waste and plastic bags will cause waterlogging since they introduce blockages.
  • Unplanned Urbanization
  • In Karachi, during the last thirty years, the skyrocketing population remained unmatched by urban planning.
  • The houses and business centers were constructed right on top of the natural drainage ways, causing blockage of drainage.
  • Obsolete Sewerage & Drainage Works
  • A large part of the sewerage system of the city has remained the same since the 1960s without having been modernized.
  • It cannot cope with current densities of people populations or rains enhanced by climate.
  • Weak and Fragmented Governance
    • Karachi is controlled by several authorities that also overlap (KMC, KDA, Cantonment Boards, and Sindh Government departments).
  • When no one organization is answerable, it is not apparent who is to take responsibility for drainage, sanitation, and response to disaster. 

Effects of the 2025 Monsoon Deluge

The ramifications of the floods in Karachi are much greater than short-term pains. The 2025 rain revealed faults in every sector:

  • Transport Paralysis
  • There were main roads that were submerged, including Shahrah-e-Faisal, University Road and even Korangi Expressway and people were stuck there for hours at a time.
  • Transport on the roads collapsed and thousands were stranded.
  • Power Outages 
  • Feeders that served more than 400 feeders tripped, causing neighborhoods to take up to 36 hours to get back to darkness.
  • There was also a shortage of electricity that interfered with pumping stations, aggravating the situation of water supply. 
  • Damage to Property & Infrastructure
  • Many low-lying localities such as Orangi Town, Korangi and Gulshan-e-Iqbal had hundreds of homes flooded.
  • Stores/markets have reported crushing losses because goods were destroyed by the floods.
  • Risk to Public Health 
  • Mosquitoes bred in standing water and increased the probability of dengue, malaria and cholera epidemics.
  • The hospitals recorded an increasing number of skin infections and cases of gastroenteritis. 
  • Economic Losses 
  • The markets in Karachi were closed down for several days.
  • Goods to be exported that were held up at the port of Karachi and the chain supply resulted in losses amounting to an estimated billions of rupees.

Climate Change: Increasing Karachi Vulnerabilities

It would not be fair to leave out the climate factor in Karachi’s frequent floods. The scientists caution that

  • Climate change is bringing about increased and unpredictable rainfall in South Asia.
  • Karachi has a coastal belt that is under threat of an increase in sea levels, which retards the natural drainage into the Arabian Sea.
  • Heat island effect in Karachi (a phenomenon of concentrated concrete-high urbanization) exacerbates the problems with rain absorption.

But it is not all about climate change. Other cities such as Bangkok, Jakarta, and Dhaka also experience monsoon floods but fare better through the prior investment in modern drainage, mobilization of warnings, and hardy city planning measures. Karachi, however, does not make long-term resilience but uses ad hoc relief operations on an annual basis.

Things Karachi Has Yet to Learn

Even after facing the same disasters in 2010, 2020, 2022 and now 2025 the cycle remains the same. Government establishes drain-cleaning campaigns prior to monsoon and declares relief schemes following floods, but reforms to the system are still not done.

Among the lessons that were not learned the hard way are

  • Lack of enforcement of anti-encroachment action on stormwater drains.
  • Failure to invest in an overall drainage master plan.
  • Duplication of powers that causes bureaucratic red tape.
  • Poor mix of climate adaptation policies with urban planning.

 Solutions Karachi Needs

This cycle has to be broken through a multi-pronged strategy based not on temporary respite. Some of the most important measures are

  • Improved Drainage/sewerage System

  • Karachi should have an updated urban drainage system that is resistant to climate change, created to attend to present-day population density. 
  • Waterlogging can be decreased through the adoption of permeable pavements and rainwater harvesting. 

  • Concerted Metropolitan Government

  • In Karachi, planning, waste managements and disaster response should be headed by a single power.
  • Efficiency in governance will eliminate blame games that have been happening every time there is a flooding crisis.

  • Anti-Encroachment Enforcement

  • Houses and business establishments along natural drainage channels should be moved.
  • This needs a political determination and programs to resettle the vulnerable communities.

  • Green Infrastructure investment

  • Rain gardens and urban forests, open green spaces, soak up water and make it not run off.
  • International experiences such as Singapore demonstrate the underlying nature-based solutions to enhance flood resilience.

  • Citizen’s Role & Awareness

  • It is upon the citizens to do their part in minimizing the waste made out of plastic and dumping trash in drains.
  • Community responsibility can be achieved through awareness.

  • Equipping Disaster Response

  • Rescue should be equipped with boats, pumps and flood warning technology.
  • Extreme weather may be fatal, and an early warning system on a city-wide basis can help rescue lives. 

World Context: Karachi in the league of vulnerable cities

Karachi is not the only one. Severe urban flooding also occurs in such cities as Mumbai (India), Jakarta (Indonesia), and Lagos (Nigeria). But quite a number have started rolling out resilient infrastructure as an example:

  • The Prevention of flooding in the Jakarta seawall project.
  • The pumping stations in Mumbai get the rainwater flushed out.
  • Underground tunnels are draining the stormwater in Bangkok.

Karachi could use such world examples, but then policymakers have to go beyond intermittent clean-up campaigns.

Conclusion: A City, that can be better

Due to the monsoon downpour that has plagued Karachi in 2025 once again, this has made it into a flooding city due to the fractures in its infrastructure, governance, and preparedness for disaster. Although it has been exacerbated by climate change, the groundwork on the issue can be sought in decades of neglect and shoddy planning and political fragmentation.

Karachi is a city of Pakistan and it is also the economic powerhouse, cultural hub and identity of the country. It requires sustainable investments in long-term climate-resilient infrastructure, good governance, and on-the-ground problem-solving to flourish.

Otherwise, next monsoon, it will be the same story in Karachi: Inundated streets, a stranded population and squandered potential. However, given a suitable outlook, this city of strength has the potential of turning an annual crisis area into a prototype urban backup.