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KASUR, Pakistan: The administration of Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province will use satellite imagery to assess crop losses from this week’s devastating floods and compensate farmers, a provincial minister said on Saturday, as raging rivers submerged farmland and forced tens of thousands to flee their homes.

The flooding began on Monday after India released water into the Chenab, Ravi and Sutlej rivers following several heavy monsoon spells, swelling their flows and inundating vast tracts of land. As the rivers surged into Pakistan, they destroyed rice fields and fodder crops, swept away herds and submerged entire settlements, uprooting farming families and leaving them without food or income.

In Punjab’s Kasur district, which borders India, more than 45,000 people were evacuated on Friday night alone after powerful floodwaters broke an embankment on the Indian side of the Sutlej.

On Saturday, flocks of people were still seen moving out of their villages near Ganda Singh Headworks with livestock, many struggling in heavy rain.

“We have information on the [damaged] crops through satellite,” Punjab Health Minister Khawaja Salman Rafique told Arab News while visiting the area.

“The satellite will tell us that water entered one field and not another,” he continued. “So, on the basis of facts, data and analysis, [people will be] compensated.”

Rafique’s statement came at a time when thousands of farmers in the province had expressed despair amid impending financial pressures after losing much of their crops this year.

He said water levels in the Sutlej, Ravi and Chenab had begun to ease but large-scale rehabilitation would only begin once the rivers receded.

People, mostly women and children, continued to leave their houses, many of them saying they fear more floodwater could flow from India.

“I have come to take my children to safety but we have left three men behind to take care of animal,” Ismail Ahmad, an uprooted villager, told Arab News.

District Emergency Officer Dr. Nayyar Alam said 81 rescue teams were operating in the area and had helped evacuate residents and save more than 4,500 animals.

“Many people did not want to leave their homes and animals [even after floods], but last night the rising water level forced them to make calls for help,” he said.

Deputy Commissioner Kasur Imran Ali said around 127 villages had been hit by floodwaters in the district.

He said out of more than 45,000 people evacuated Friday night, only about 500 opted to go to government relief camps set up in schools.

“Most of the people want to stay with their relatives for a few days until the flood is over,” he said.

Meanwhile, at a camp in District Public School, some evacuees had already developed scabies and diarrhea, underscoring fears of water-borne diseases.

Authorities said medical camps were established in advance and medicine stocks had been dispatched to vulnerable areas.

Rice fields in Kasur were seen submerged in up to 13 feet of water, in what officials described as the worst flooding in nearly four decades.

TIANJIN, China: President Xi Jinping gathered the leaders of Russia and India among dignitaries from around 20 Eurasian countries on Sunday for a showpiece summit aimed at putting China front and center of regional relations.
Security was tight in the northern port city of Tianjin, where the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit is being held until Monday, days before a massive military parade in the capital Beijing to mark 80 years since the end of World War II.
The SCO comprises China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus — with 16 more countries affiliated as observers or “dialogue partners.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin touched down in Tianjin on Sunday with an entourage of senior politicians and business representatives.
Meanwhile Xi held a flurry of bilateral meetings with leaders from the Maldives, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and one of Putin’s staunch allies, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
He also met India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Xinhua news agency reported.
China and Russia have sometimes touted the SCO as an alternative to the NATO military alliance. This year’s summit is the first since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House.
In an interview published by Xinhua on Saturday, Putin said the summit will “strengthen the SCO’s capacity to respond to contemporary challenges and threats, and consolidate solidarity across the shared Eurasian space.”
“All this will help shape a fairer multipolar world order,” Putin said.
As China’s claim over Taiwan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have seen them clash with the United States and Europe, experts say that Beijing and Moscow are eager to use platforms such as the SCO to curry favor.
“China has long sought to present the SCO as a non-Western-led power bloc that promotes a new type of international relations, which, it claims, is more democratic,” said Dylan Loh, an assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
More than 20 leaders including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan are attending the bloc’s largest meeting since its founding in 2001.
“The large-scale participation indicates China’s growing influence and the SCO’s appeal as a platform for non-Western countries,” Loh added.
Beijing, through the SCO, will try to “project influence and signal that Eurasia has its own institutions and rules of the game,” said Lizzi Lee from the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“It is framed as something different, built around sovereignty, non-interference, and multipolarity, which the Chinese tout as a model,” Lee said.
Xi met leaders including Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet in Tianjin on Saturday.
Putin is expected to hold talks on Monday with Turkiye’s Erdogan and Iran’s Pezeshkian about the Ukraine conflict and Tehran’s nuclear program respectively.
The Russian president needs “all the benefits of SCO as a player on the world stage and also the support of the second largest economy in the world,” said Lim Tai Wei, a professor and East Asia expert at Japan’s Soka University.
“Russia is also keen to win over India, and India’s trade frictions with the United States presents this opportunity,” Lim said.
The summit comes days after India was hit by a sharp bump up in US tariffs on its goods as punishment for New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil.
India’s premier Modi arrived on Saturday, in his first visit to China since 2018.
The two most populous nations are intense rivals competing for influence across South Asia and fought a deadly border clash in 2020.
A thaw began last October, when Modi met with Xi for the first time in five years at a summit in Russia.
Modi was not on a list of attendees for the Beijing parade published by Chinese state media that included Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un.