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Comment by rch | Hacker News Reader

> turning what were once agricultural fields into a giant inland lake. It's a shocking transformation

Is the agricultural capacity of this area dependent on periodic flooding, similar to historical patterns of the Nile?

Some amount of flooding is expected in Kaccha/Katcha Doaba land, but this level of flooding was very anomalous due to Climate Change plus some questionable urban planning. Add to that the fact that ongoing local elections in Sindh has paralyzed the state's civil service and this became a horrible calamity.

edit:

Je tussi ek kissan da mundeh ki comment nu downvote kar rehe hai, tenu khuch galt fami hegi. Sindh, Pakhtunkwa, Punjab, Himachal, Jammu, Kashmir, Haryana, Uttarakhand, aur Delhi NCR di kissani saili ta bilkul same to same hege Angrezo aur Environment di whajese.

First comment in Punjabi on Hacker news :) ... You right, we are together in this climate change disaster

Agreed! There needs to be much more coordination at the SAARC level to solve these issues. Honestly cross-border trade would be amazing for Northern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The Partition and instability of the 70s-90s really destroyed the economic potential of the region.

Translation: Those of you who are downvoting a farmer’s (Edit: son’s, munda can be more generic term for person too) comment are misinformed. Farmers of Sindh, …, and Delhi NCR are in the same boat because of the British and the environment.

* son of a farmer. never lived on a farm myself (grew up here in North America) but my dad did growing up and during summer vacations we'd often help my grandfather as well with the kharif crop.

Periodic floods bringing down alluvial soil are definitely part of what made these regions fertile and highly populated. But I do not know if floods are continually needed to maintain the fertility, or how this flood compares to historic floods.

doubtful that it's depending on this level of flooding.

It could be unprecedented on 100-1000 year timescales, and still be within geologic norms.

Just trying to categorize this event relative to e.g. Greenland ice sheet melting.

Reading this thread got me to pull up a map and notice the Mohenjo-Daro site[0] is evidently being damaged by the current flooding, particularly in excavated areas[1]. It would appear that in the 1960's there was a flurry of publications arguing about the idea that perhaps the Mohenjo-Daro civilization declined precisely because its cities had been destroyed by catastrophic floods. There's a lot to read, but I found this article[2] from 1965 that goes into a lot of detail about studies of flooding in the area, and mentions some of the research of the time.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohenjo-daro

[1]https://odishatv.in/news/international/pakistan-floods-damag...

[2]https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/civilization-and-fl...

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