This is a region where, if you have survived the night, you are not likely to get your morning cup of tea because all milk-producing livestock is dead—swept away by the angry, swirling waters.

No newspaper to know what’s happening around because the approach roads and the railway tracks have been washed away; no electricity or any other signs of civilisation.

And you cannot even venture out for fear of getting drowned. Worse still, while water is all you see for miles around, there is not a drop to drink.

For 25 lakh marooned people in six districts of Bihar, that are close to Nepal, this is Apocalypse. They have suddenly found themselves on the river bed.

And the stranded population looks blindly into the rising waters that are rapidly eating into more territories every day. Floods have never been alien to Bihar.

In fact, the state is often struck by the calamity besides famine. But this is different, because the state now has to evacuate over 12-15 lakh people, unprecedented for its sheer magnitude.

The shifting of the Kosi may have been referred to as a sudden and shocking happening by Bihar Government officials. But those in the know say this was waiting to happen.

The river is known to have started building pressure on the embankment immediately after it was jacketed in the 1950s, though it failed to make an immediate impact.

The guard was strong but it surely started eroding the corners in the absence of proper repair. Besides, experts believe the embankment checked the flow of water but not siltation and that made the difference in terms of shifting the course of the river.

Officials concede that the current breaching of the embankment could be the result of lack of maintenance.

The argument gains credence because the river had failed to cause as much damage to Bihar villages during the previous seven times when it had breached the barrage near Kusaha in Nepal.

Incidentally, the Kosi carries with its waters tonnes of silt every year, which it keeps depositing along its course from the plains of Nepal to Kursela in Bihar where it joins the mighty Ganga.

The current breach is also said to have resulted due to heavy siltation that often forces the river to look for a new path.

The heavy silt deposits and the land tilt are believed to have guided the river eastward this time and as a result, the river, which had shifted its course from east to west by over 120 km during the last 250 years, now suddenly has a new path.

A weak embankment gave way to the turbulent water and then as if possessing the instinct of a wild beast, the river trampled everything that came in its way.

The breach was also caused by the heavy siltation before the Bhimnagar barrage which, unlike previous times, was not even perfunctorily desilted before the onset of the monsoon this year.

Locals in Supaul said the engineers and the water resources officials had enough time to plug the breach when it was first discovered in the first week of August. But two weeks were allowed to lapse before the river struck with all its fury.

The Kosi river is now travelling into an area where people had not experienced floods and, therefore had no fear of the disaster for at least three decades.



Today, they stand trapped between the old and the new streams of the river. The 400-metre breach that was officially detected on August 18 has now widened to almost three kilometre and is expanding further.

And since then, the river that has earned the sobriquet the “Sorrow of Bihar” is living up to its notoriety.

Sweeping through the districts of Supaul, Madhepura, Araria, Saharsa, Khagaria—and now threatening to engulf parts of Katihar and Purnia— the Kosi fury has already spelt death and destruction.

At present, the level of water discharged from the Kosi is 1.44 lakh cusec. Worse still, since the river is traditionally known to swell to a peak between the months of October and November—when the volume of water discharged increases five times—the destruction is likely to be much worse.

The problems in the case of Madhepura and Supaul—which stand the risk of getting wiped off the map—are most alarming. Sample this: over 30 inmates of Virpur subdivisional jail have gone missing after over five-feet high water column submerged the prison premises on August 24.

Nobody knows if the inmates have escaped or lost their lives to the fury of water. From Madhepura jail, 545 prisoners have been transferred to Saharsa.

Sonbarsa MLA Kishore Kumar Munna told India Today that he had seen hundreds of bodies including those of mothers with their dead children still clung to them. “Thousands have been swept away,” he said.

Manoj Yadav, a farmer from Kuchcha Purab Tola of Kumarkhand block in Madhepura, who has taken shelter at a Saharsa relief camp with his family, confirmed having seen “dozens of bodies floating” while travelling in a hired boat.

While no officials are willing to either confirm or deny the estimated casualties, the official death figures from Kosi waters is nine. No wonder, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has described the floods as “nothing less than a catastrophe”.

However, what he left unsaid is something that makes it even more ironic— the disaster has all the elements of man-made avoidable errors.

According to the 1954 agreement (revised in 1966) reached between India and Nepal over the Kosi project, the construction, repair and maintenance of the barrage located in Nepal has been Bihar’s responsibility for which the state is reimbursed by the Centre.

This year, the engineers had started the strengthening work, where a breach was officially recorded on August 18, but washed their hands off by registering an FIR against local Nepal residents who were creating hurdles in the repair work.

One of the other major reasons that kept them from reaching the embankment of the Kosi near Kusaha was the threat from the Maoists. The Nepalese Police were also not willing to deal with the Maoists.

But then, nobody had gauged the enormity of the threat and by the time they got their act together, the embankment was breached.

In fact, the state Government on August 10 received a fax from Supaul District Magistrate Sharif Alam that conclusively said that the “situation was under control”. A fortnight later, the state Government had to give marching orders to him and his Saharsa counterpart Garib Sahu for not taking timely action. Supaul Superintendent of Police Shyam Kumar too was shifted.

However, the state Government is surreptitiously silent on the role of its Water Resources Minister Vijendra Prasad Yadav, whose task was to ensure maintenance of the barrage.

He failed terribly on this account. Ironically, Yadav himself is an MLA from Supaul and therefore was well aware of the threat perception. Now many parts of his district may never emerge from water unless the Kosi’s flow is changed.

It is clear that the administration in the affected districts, besides the Water Resources Department, was caught napping.

“They thought that the Kosi waters, like previous years, would go the traditional way after vainly hitting the East afflux embankment near Kusaha. In their smugness, they even overlooked the breach that is now too big to be plugged easily,” said an official of disaster management wing.

Water resource resource engineers say because of the archaic cement-boulder approach, plans to place boulders to stop the water flow would turn out to be a longdrawn exercise.

Yet, according to Superintending Engineer Ashram Rai, more than 11,000 boulders were made available before the breach actually happened. The engineers could not put them to use because of the “law and order situation in Nepal”.

So far, Union ministers Lalu Prasad Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan have undertaken aerial surveys of the affected localities. The subsequent press conferences that the two leaders have convened were full of political overtones. Despite claims to the contrary, the emphasis like always was on scoring brownie points.

Meanwhile, according to Additional Secretary, Disaster Management, Pratyay Amrit, carrying out relief operations in many areas has been a herculean task because, even as the flood water is enough to submerge the localities, the water level is too less to let the relief boats ply.

At the same time the administration cannot wait for the level to rise sufficiently because by then the devastation will be total. The situation has become so grim that even the relief camps set up in safe zones are being shifted because of the ever-swelling waters.

Over 75 such camps have been set up for some 70,000 people who have been rescued so far.

However, the people who were marooned are reluctant to abandon their homes because they think the waters will recede as it happens during the regular floods. But the chief minister has appealed to them to evacuate the areas at the earliest.

The water channel emerging from the breach point has now become the main stream and the volume of water may continue to increase till October.

The breach in the embankment can be plugged only after the Kosi flow is regulated back to its traditional course, which is being attempted by digging channels to guide the water back to the main river bed.

But this is a time-consuming process and is unlikely to be over before October 31. The breach, therefore, can be mended only by November, which will make the relief operations one of the longest of all times.

It is unfortunate that even as people suffer an avoidable tragedy, the political leaders are busy passing the buck.

 Copyright © 2008 India Today Group.