[Reader-list] Sadanand Menon on Bihar floods

[prakash ray]

http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=333521
*Sadanand Menon on Bihar floods
*Not floods but criminal design failure- Sadanand Menon

The jacketing or embanking of the river systems in north Bihar must go down
as among the most ill-thought out schemes in Independent India.

I am talking about the so-called 'floods' in north Bihar. Many adjectives
have been spun by political and media establishments over the past three
weeks to describe the unprecedented inundation of 16 districts and
displacement of close to five million people. It has been called a deluge,
devastation and a 'national calamity'. No one, however, has used the term
'criminal design failure' and sought to expose the culpability of political
and technical establishments in the whole sordid affair.

No one has pointed out that it was a 50-year-old time-bomb waiting to
explode. Even as the first of this modern-Indian project of embanking the
Kosi began in 1955, it was clear that a recipe for disaster had been drawn
up and that Bihar was due for a jala-samadhi sooner or later.

There is an attempt to treat the August 18 breach in the eastern embankment
of Kosi at Kusaha, on the Indo-Nepal border, as some kind of a unique,
one-off event. As if this was a 'natural disaster' due to unusually heavy
rainfall in the Himalayan slopes from where the river originates. Worse, as
if Nepal was to blame, as it allegedly reneged on its commitments to
maintain and dredge the barrage and the embankments on its side of the
border due its preoccupation with the political change of guard there.

No one has so much as whispered that the maintenance of the barrage and the
embankments is the responsibility of the engineers of the Bihar Water
Resources Department. Demonising Nepal is one of those convenient blame
games the media likes to indulge in and it is not new, in the context of a
drowning Bihar. In earlier years too such accusations have been made along
with contradictory proposals to seek multi-national corporate investments to
build and operate mega dams on the Nepal part of the river, particularly the
Kosi High Dam at Barahkshetra.

>From the time I travelled in these parts 20 years ago, studying the
repeating annual cycle of water-logging, food or water famines, homelessness
and epidemics in the 16 districts of north Bihar, it has been clear to me
that there is a deep criminality in the planning, designing and execution of
the river embankment projects of this region.

The basic story is about how the north to south flowing rivers in Bihar like
the Mahananda, Kosi, Kamala, Dhousa, Adhwara, Bagmati, Burhi Gandak, Gandak
and Ghaghra were subjected to systematic embanking since 1954. The initial
intention was to contain the natural swing of these rivers as they gushed
down from the foothills of Nepal to the plains of Bihar.

The plan was to introduce about 150 kilometres of embankment on the Kosi to
protect a declared 'flood prone' area in the state of some 25 lakh hectares.
Today, some 50 years later, north Bihar is a warren of over 3,500 kilometres
of embankments, with the declared 'flood prone' area having crossed a
staggering 75 lakh hectares. And this staggering debacle has been at the
cost of over Rs 3, 000 crore.

The embankment debate had, in fact, begun in the late 19th century and there
exist at least 70 years of records till the 1950s in which most expert
opinion warns against pursuing the embankment route to tackle perennial
overflowing or swing in a river's temperament, as it would impede natural
drainage. Kosi's character was to rush down the hills with an immense load
of top soil and spread it across the plains, enabling a bumper crop the next
year.

The initial embankments, eight feet high, converted the Kosi bed into a
catchment area for silt. As the first phase ended in1965, the river had
risen four feet. The bund had to be raised further. This became a regular
cycle. Today, Kosi flows a good 25 to 30 feet above ground level. Every time
there is a threat of flooding, parts of the embankment are strategically
dynamited to let the water out. This is what gets labelled the 'flood'.

But this is a flood that cannot recede. The river basin is way above ground
level and water cannot flow upwards. The inundated villages between as well
as outside the embankments stay water-logged for months on end, leading to
rise in soil salinity, water-borne diseases and producing hordes of migrant
labour. Even before the current crisis in Bihar — for the past twenty-five
years — at least 3.5 million people have been living in shacks atop the
embankments, making rotis out of the seeds of a grass that grows on its
slopes.

The embankment project is one of the greatest 'design failures' of our
times. This is not the last we are going to hear of the floods. Bihar is
destined to stay submerged for a long time.