“Ye teesra sheher hai (This is the third city),” Haji Umer Sholani Baloch quipped, watching the Indus’ floodwaters push past Kotri barrage and spill into the sea in Keti Bunder. A native son of this sinking coastline, Umer’s offhand remark captures the tragedy that has unfolded here: entire settlements swallowed, rebuilt, and swallowed again as sea intrusion becomes an unrelenting fact of life.

His words carry an unspoken warning: the Arabian Sea is advancing. And in this fragile delta at the tail-end of the Indus Basin Irrigation System, it has already forced whole communities to uproot and retreat.

Keti Bunder, a once bustling seaport that lies in Thatta district, was once the glittering capital of Sindh. Historical accounts place Thatta at the centre of power from the 14th to 16th centuries, until the arrival of the Mughals. The late Ghulam Mohammad Lakho, who headed Sindh University’s history department, once told me that Thatta served as the capital under the Soomro and Samma dynasties (1335–1520), and remained a port city well into the 18th century. He often quoted the Persian author Mir Tahir Nasyani, who wrote: “The people of Thatta never experienced hunger when it basked in economic prosperity.”

Umer Baloch, too, grew up on stories of a thriving Keti Bunder. It was the same historical memory that resurfaced during the Musharraf era, when then-chief minister Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim proposed reviving Keti Bunder as Sindh’s third seaport. But today, the town faces a different fate including collapsing farmlands, migration, and the slow violence of a sea inching inland.

“The city was known for its rich agricultural landscape,” Umer tells me from behind the counter of his small grocery shop, lit only by a solar panel because electricity is unreliable here. Like many residents of Keti Bunder, he has turned to the sun for power.

The turning point came as the Indus began to thin. Freshwater flows declined, and the sea began to eat its way in. “Sheher iss se pehle aagay hota tha,” he explained, recalling that the town used to lie further ahead. Entire communities, their homes and their businesses, have been pushed inland repeatedly by sea intrusion, forcing them to rebuild their lives on shrinking land.

The conversation is joined by Ghulam Hyder Channa, a small farmer who grows vegetables and cultivates paddy. “The destruction of our region actually began after 1964,” he said. “We once received freshwater throughout the year.”

Wheat, sugar cane, bananas, and the famed varieties of red rice were once staples of undivided Thatta’s fields. But as river flows dwindled, and floodwaters became rare, arriving now only during the monsoon or extreme climate events (like the ones recorded in 2025), the entire landscape transformed.

Channa noted that a rice factory operated in Keti Bunder until 1955 — a reminder that this was once a region dominated by rice cultivation, a water-intensive crop. Today, such mills have largely shifted to upper Sindh or to traditional rice belts like Tando Mohammad Khan.

“We are living through a crisis,” Hyder lamented. “Imagine the prosperity of a place where people once had enough to offer milk as a soft drink.” Fifty years ago, he added, massive river flows posed the biggest challenge to those living along the banks. “Now it is saline seawater that is swallowing our land.”

Even the road leading into Keti Bunder, he said, acts like an informal dyke.........

© Dawn Prism