Flooded by stupidity

Every year north Bihar is devastated by floods. According to the Report of the National Commission on Floods, 16.5 per cent of the total flo...

Every year north Bihar is devastated by floods. According to the Report of the National Commission on Floods, 16.5 per cent of the total flood-affected area of the country falls in Bihar and 56.5 per cent of the flood-affected people belong to this very region.

Whenever there are floods in Bihar it is claimed that Nepal has released its water and the Bihar government keeps blaming Nepal for not building dams to control its rivers. While the authorities neatly pass the buck, the hapless people of the state are left in waist-deep waters.

North Bihar is interspersed with eight major river basins: Ghaghra, Gandak, Budhi Gandak, Bagmati, Adhwara group of rivers, Kamla, Kosi and Mahananda. Except for the Budhi Gandak and Mahananda, all the other rivers originate in Nepal and they bring with them a lot of detritus as they come down to the plains from the Himalayas. This results in the deposition of an enormous amount of sediment, which obstructs the flow of the rivers. Floods do renew the fertility of the soil every year and this may have attracted the early settlers to this area. But today, the boon is seen as a bane.

Water can be stored in Nepal if dams are constructed there. But is there any progress in this regard? On April 6 1947, the then union minister for planning, C.H. Bhabha, had announced that talks with Nepal were in progress for the construction of dams. On June 5, 8217;04, the union minister for water resources, Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, announced that talks were underway. The same statement has been repeated over the years.

In Nepal, flood control does not figure on the agenda. If at all dams are constructed in that country, it will be for hydro-electricity. In 8217;92, it had begun constructing a dam on Arun three, a tributary of the Kosi. It was proposed that 201 MW of electricity would be generated in the first phase. The project was abandoned midway as there was no agreement with India for the purchase of the electricity that was to be generated.

The second issue that merits debate is the effectiveness of embankments in controlling floods. Even after the construction of 2912 km of embankments in Bihar the problem persists. In fact, the embankments have merely transferred, not stopped, floods. They also cause waterlogging because rainwater stagnates around them. Also, because of the embankments, silt deposits in the river cause the river8217;s bed to get raised. The history of embankments is at least 2,700 years old. The Chinese river, Hwang Ho, was the first river to have embankments built around it. Over the years its bed has risen so high that it now flows 30 feet above ground level.

It seems that the only way to cope with floods is to live with them. We need to evolve lifestyles based on flood patterns so that with some advance planning people can be evacuated from these regions without much trauma.