he air felt wounded the moment I arrived in Union Council Chatto Chand, in Thatta district, near Keenjhar Lake. It clung to my throat, heavy and abrasive, filling my lungs with an unseen weight. Within minutes, my eyes began to water, my chest tightened and I started coughing. Locals told me this was no longer unusual. This, they said, was now their everyday weather.

What drifted through the sky was not dust, but the residue of mining explosions.

Across the Karachi Water Canal, the source was plainly visible. A group of men stood around a freshly drilled hole in the rocky spine of the Thatta hills, pouring in a mixture of chemicals, nitrogen compounds, urea and petrol. Moments later, the ground convulsed. The blast echoed across the backwaters of Keenjhar Lake, rattling walls and sending birds scattering into the air.

Dozens of such explosions are carried out every day. Sindh’s largest freshwater body is being steadily destroyed by dynamite; not by drought, but by design.

Four stone-crushing plants operate continuously in and around Chatto Chand, all located close to Keenjhar Lake. Each employs around 150 workers and dispatches as many as 120 heavy dumpers daily along the narrow village roads.

Local labourers say five to six explosions a day are enough to shake the foundations of houses and schools within a four-kilometre radius of the lake. A 2021 court order prohibiting unlawful stone-crushing operations remains in the field, but its enforcement is virtually non-existent. While communities endure the consequences in silence, local powerbrokers continue to profit from the contracts.

“I can’t risk my students’ lives anymore,” says Altaf Qureshi, a teacher at a nearby school. “Whenever there’s a tremor, the classroom fills with dust. The windows shake. The children can barely breathe.”

Around 15,000 people live in Chatto Chand, all of them within the blasting radius.

Early health consequences are already visible. Research indexed on PubMed shows that 80 percent of South Asian quarry workers exposed to silica-rich dust develop respiratory disorders and 78 percent suffer fom persistent coughing and chest congestion. Residents here say the effects are no longer abstract statistics but daily lived realities.

“My head feels like it will burst during the blasts,” says Zulekha, a local resident. “I cannot breathe, and my child cannot sleep. Inside my skull, the sound is unbearable.”

Children run through streets coated in fine dust, rubbing their eyes. Fazil, a boy with tears streaming down his face, says simply: “When they blast, my eyes hurt. I can’t see.”

Doctors at nearby Makli Civil Hospital report a marked rise in asthma, skin rashes, conjunctivitis and pre-term births over the past three years, a pattern consistent with environmental health data released by the Pakistan Medical Association in 2023. When contacted by The News on Sunday, the district health officer condemned the situation as “brutal” but added, “What can I do? This is treated as an emergency issue,” distancing his office from any regulatory responsibility.

The damage extends far beyond the hills being blasted. The entire Keenjhar watershed is under threat.

“If this continues, Keenjhar will turn from a lake into a lagoon of dust.”

Each explosion fractures the laterite and limestone layers that regulate underground aquifers feeding the lake. As shockwaves travel into surrounding wetlands, fine particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10) increases turbidity, smothering aquatic vegetation and disrupting fragile ecosystems.

A 2024 assessment by the Environmental Protection Agency found that total suspended particulates in the Chatto Chand area exceed Pakistan’s National Environmental Quality Standards by more than five times, reaching 550 micrograms per cubic metre.

Wildlife has also declined sharply. According to a 2023 migratory bird census, the number of birds at Keenjhar Lake has fallen from more than 140,000 in the 1970s to fewer than 2,000. The lake supports dozens of species, including mammals, birds and fish, but a thin film of dust now coats wetland vegetation, blocking sunlight and suffocating the phytoplankton at the base of the aquatic food chain.

Data from the Fisheries Department show that dissolved oxygen levels in the lake have dropped from 8.3 mg/L in 2010 to 5.6 mg/L in 2024, a decline with severe implications for fish stocks.

Farmers in the surrounding area say their land is disappearing. “I had 25 acres,” says Imran Hijeb Jakhro. “Now, 17 are gone. My fields were covered in dust. Everything withered. We are dying a slow death because of these plants.”

Studies published in environmental health journals confirm that communities living within 10 kilometres of blasting sites experience significant soil contamination and water sedimentation.

Those who speak out face retaliation.

In 2023, more than 400 residents were named in what locals describe as a fabricated first information report after a peaceful protest. Their demand was straightforward: enforce the Sindh High Court’s ban on unlawful stone-crushing operations.

“Here, the law works in reverse,” says social activist Muzaffar Hejib. “Those who destroy the land are protected, while those who defend it are criminalised.”

Political pressure has kept the issue largely out of the public eye. Residents allege that local politicians benefit from the industry through indirect ownership, creating a culture of silence. A sitting member of the Provincial Assembly is widely believed to have links to the crusher operations, and to have done nothing to stop them.

Keenjhar Lake is not just a body of water. It is Karachi’s primary freshwater source, supplying drinking water to nearly 20 million people, according to the Sindh Irrigation Department. Every gram of silica and nitrate dust that settles on its surface ultimately travels through canals and pipes to the city’s taps.

If the lake’s natural filtration and recharge systems fail, Karachi could face water shortages on the scale of Cape Town’s 2018 crisis, a risk highlighted in UNESCO’s Water Security Risk Atlas. What is happening in Chatto Chand is therefore not a remote environmental issue, but an urban emergency in the making.

Each blast destroys more than stone. It strips away belonging and erodes hope. A teacher’s classroom, a farmer’s land, a child’s eyesight, all disappear into the grey haze of what is euphemistically called ‘development.’ The cranes, cormorants and reed-song that once defined Keenjhar are fading into silence.

As hydrologist and water expert Obhayo Khushk warns: “If this continues, Keenjhar will turn from a lake into a lagoon of dust. We are witnessing the slow death of Sindh’s ecological heart.”

The destruction of Keenjhar is not natural; it is human-made. Its consequences are moving steadily towards Karachi. They threaten to leave the city thirsty. For those living closest to this catastrophe, the danger is already visible, felt in their lungs, their water and their lives.

The state must choose differently. It must stop measuring value in tonnes of stone and start recognising the human cost borne by communities being dismantled in the name of privilege and profit.

Despite the dust, the lake continues to breathe, faintly, painfully. Whether the world pays attention before the next explosion shatters the silence will determine how long it survives.

The writer is a researcher and development practitioner based in Hyderabad. He can be reached at [email protected]