By Dr Shazia Anwer Cheema
Rivers do not talk, they roar, particularly when they are wounded and hurt. Their roars are the sound of gushing waters, cracking soils, moving boulders like wooden piles, and the cries of people engulfed by river waters.
Rivers and nullahs do not have the pleasure of hiring expensive legal teams who can protect them from ruthless encroachments, nor do they have resources to post goons to fight against encroachers. They have only one option to fight against human subjugation, and that is showing their wrath by flushing out invaders and reclaiming their lands.
Historically and anthropologically, River Ravi is considered a somber, calm, intelligent, and benevolent river that mothered countless civilizations on its beds, but historically it shows rage whenever Ravi has felt that enough is enough. So once again Ravi is showing that human greed has already crossed limits and it is time to roar. The 80 years of data of River Ravi show that it reacted sharply only four times in 80 years — 1950, 1976, 1988, and now in August 2025. Otherwise, River Ravi kept sleeping and ignoring the minor human interventions such as pharmaceutical waste and toxic wastes.
The 2025 disaster did not take place in one day. Rather, it was bought by a man who sold the fertile riverbeds of Ravi to the superclass to build housing societies and skyscrapers. He was no one else but Imran Khan Niazi, who is actually responsible for drowning half of Lahore by starting something he could never finish and selling Ravi riverbed to urban residential and commercial ventures. Like his billion trees Tsunami disaster, this Ravi Urban Development Authority (RUDA) project also destroyed the natural ecosystem of Lahore’s Ravi River. RUDA is considered one of the biggest land scams of Punjab, but this project is yet to be abandoned, although the PTI government ended years ago.
Imran Khan promoted this catastrophic and cynical project as an “eco-city,” but RUDA was, in fact, Punjab’s largest land grab — destroying Lahore’s natural floodplain. Imran Khan, in several official statements, called this demonic project “the future of Lahore.” Around 150,000 acres of fertile agricultural land and floodplains were taken away from farmers having agricultural ancestry of thousands of years, using state power under Section 4, and the lands have still not been returned to farmers, although the PTI government in Punjab ended in 2022. The land that was forcefully taken from farmers and bought for housing societies was the land that acted as Lahore’s ecological buffer against floods. By turning it into lifeless concrete, Imran Khan stripped the mankind from its natural protection.
Like hyenas, Khan’s cronies devoured fertile land and ecology. History will not remember Imran Khan as an imposter who not only tried to rip the population from their cultural identity rather he went as far as to selling Ravi riverbed to the mafias. No action has yet been taken against Imran Khan and his avaricious team who created a man-made disaster in the form of the recent floods, not only in Lahore but downstream as well, because they played havoc with the natural flow of River Ravi’s waters. Scientific studies, such as a 2024 ‘Nature’ journal’s article on Ravi River flows, indicate that climate-driven floods and land use changes are already stressing the river’s ecosystem, suggesting RUDA’s construction could exacerbate water scarcity and ecological damage in Lahore, contradicting its “green” marketing.
Legal context shows political influence, with the Supreme Court overturning the Lahore High Court (LHC) decision in 2022 under pressure from the Punjab government and developers, raising questions about elite-driven real estate interests overshadowing environmental and public welfare concerns. The RUDA case is about a mega urban development project inside a thirsty river considering its quench will be everlasting however challenged in courts for illegal land acquisition and environmental destruction but no vain. The Lahore High Court struck down parts of the law, but the Supreme Court allowed conditional continuation. The main environmental concerns are water depletion, deforestation, smog intensification, and destruction of Ravi’s ecosystem.
The majority of us may not know that ecosystems (nature) talks, it weeps, it laughs, and it curses as well. Related to my field of study, Ecosemiotics is a branch of semiotics that interacts and intersects with human ecology, ecological anthropology, and ecocriticism. Ecosemiotics indicates that nature sends signs for humans to know the mood it has, and this sign-mediated aspect of ecosystems is overt as well as covert. The environment has semiotic qualities in different ways and levels. The material environment has affordances and potentials to participate in sign relations. It is a proven fact in human history that only those cultures survive that respect this interaction of ecosystems with humans. The environment is not only meaningful in literary and artistic representations or through the symbolization of landscapes, rather it manifests the human-nature relationship.
Ecosemiotics analyzes processes, transmissions, and problems that occur in and between the different semiotic layers of the environment. Semiotic scholars such as Winfried Nöth, Kalevi, Almo Farina, and Timo Maran have worked extensively in the field of the semiotics of landscape. The landscape of today’s River Ravi — inundated lands, displaced people, and protesting residents of posh colonies of RUDA — represents that our society is deaf and blind, neither listening nor seeing the signs of nature, and is awaiting to face the wrath of nature. The Ecological Code (introduced by Alexander Levich) defines the set of (sign) relations (regular irreducible correspondences) characteristic of an entire ecosystem. The concepts of ecomones and coactones (introduced by Marcel Florkin) should be part of our feasibility reports to respect the mediation of ecological inter-individual relations before announcing something extraordinarily unnatural in natural environments.
The greed of characters like Imran Khan can be disastrous not only for the environment but also for generations of humans because nature ‘pushes back’ ruthlessly, and humans, despite technological support, are still unable to fight nature. Massive forest fires, floods, droughts, and famines are the ‘push back’ that we have been witnessing since human history was documented.
What River Ravi is doing is justified because it has been a victim of encroachments and human greed for decades, yet it reacted too late being a somber and kind river. However, enough is enough, and we are facing what we had to — as it was written on the wall of history.
Note: The writer is a Doctor of Philosophy in Semiotics and Philosophy of Communication from Charles University Prague. She can be reached at shaziaanwer@yahoo.com
