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.
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