Resilience Should Not Keep Arriving First for the Few

The engineering of this century mostly works. Fusion carries near a third of the grid, desalination turns sea into standpipe, and a scattering of towns rode out August without a flicker. What does not work is the order in which relief arrives — always to the prepared, the wired, the underwritten, and only later, if at all, to the corridor ward waiting in a night queue. That order is a choice, not a law of physics. The nine-trillion water package the Concordat will review this month is the right instrument aimed at the right problem; whether it reaches the standpipe or the ledger is a matter of will, not capacity. I have watched a Karachi supervisor named Farhana Bibi cut a fainting queue in half by moving taps to midnight — no new technology, only the decision to treat the waiting as a problem worth solving. Twelve billion of us share one warming planet. Resilience exists. The task before us is not to invent it again but to stop rationing it to the few who bought in early.