Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority publishes a situation report every day of the monsoon, numbered in sequence from the season’s start on 26 June. Report No. 45, covering the twenty-four hours to 1pm on 9 August and the season cumulatively, records 153 people killed and 457 injured. Broken out, the dead are 51 men, 29 women and 73 children; the injured are 194 men, 111 women and 152 children.
Children are therefore 47.7 per cent of the people the monsoon has killed and 33.3 per cent of the people it has injured — a gap of 14.5 percentage points between the two shares. The comparison that gives it weight is the agency’s own file: NDMA’s Report No. 45 from last year, covering 26 June to 9 August 2025, carries the same column headings, the same reporting window and the same file reference, and gives 46.9 per cent and 33.2 per cent, a gap of 13.7 points. Two seasons of very different size produced almost the same split.
Turned round, the figures describe survival rather than exposure. This season, for every child killed 2.08 people were injured; for every adult killed, 3.81. Last year the same ratios were 1.71 and 3.04. In both, an adult caught in a monsoon incident is roughly twice as likely as a child to be counted among the injured rather than the dead.
The causes column suggests why. Across the readable daily incident tables of this season, house collapse accounts for about 76 of some 145 individually recorded deaths, more than half; then drowning at 23, flash flooding at 18 or 19, lightning at 11 and electrocution at 8. A roof coming down on a sleeping household is a different hazard from a river rising, and it falls on whoever is inside.
By volume this is a mild season. Deaths are down 49.5 per cent on the same date last year and injuries down 37.6 per cent, on an identical 45-day window, and both reports reconcile: all seven province rows sum exactly to the printed national totals, in all eight columns, in both years.
That similarity should not be read as a law. NDMA prints no age cutoff for “Children” anywhere in either season’s reports, and the running share is not stable within a season: this year it was zero in late June, 50.0 per cent on 6 July, back to 38.5 per cent on 13 July, and has climbed since. The match on 9 August is a coincidence of dates rather than a season-long parallel. The agency also revises quietly — four downward steps appear in last year’s cumulative series, two of them inside the comparison window — though none changes the 9 August totals.
Last year showed how fast the composition can move. On 14 August 2025 the cumulative toll was 313 dead, with children at 45.4 per cent. Two days later it was 645, and children were 26.4 per cent. The 332 deaths added in that interval were 81 per cent adult men. NDMA’s own daily table for 15 August records 180 deaths in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa alone — 78 in Buner, 24 in Shangla, 23 in Mansehra, 21 in Bajaur — with the cause column reading a mixture of flash flood, house collapse and lightning rather than any single event. The 2025 season finished, in the consolidated report dated 2 October, at 1,037 dead with children at 27.3 per cent.