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Floods, Bihar's fount of misery

Bihar has been facing floods since time immemorial, but the situation seems to be getting worse with each passing year as the state tries to tame the deluge with misplaced engineering which neglect conventional wisdom.

The state wants to obstruct and exercise control over the river regime but not use floods to its advantage through better landuse and planning, experts say.

The thrust is to construct and not conserve, with disastrous results. At the beginning of the plan period in 1952 the flood-prone area in the state was pegged at 2.5 million hectares, which had 'grown' to 6.89 million hectares by 1994. Seventeen percent (nine million hectares) of Bihar's land area is now permanently waterlogged.

Since 1955, the year Bihar initiated flood-control works, about Rs 3750 million has been spent on constructing embankments, the only intervention in the name of flood control in the state, and more than Rs 7000 million on its maintenance.

Yet every year floods in Bihar, especially in its northern parts, claim many lives and inflict huge losses on crops and property.

Even as the problem lies elsewhere, the state government merrily states that deforestation in Nepal is the root cause of the flood problem in the Bihar plains.

The New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment in a recent report explodes this myth saying that the Himalayas are the youngest mountain chain in the world and are prone to erosion. They erode at the rate of one millimetre, but rise by seven millimetres, annually. Slopes become sharper and egro landslides. Trees at best can only delay erosion here.

''Erosion, surface run-off, flood and siltation will result when a well developed water system batters an unstable and weak mountain system,'' says Dr Jayanta Bandhopadaya, a natural resource management expert from the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkutta.

Hence, rivers coming into north Bihar bring down enormous quantities of silt from the Himalayas. In the flatlands they deposit this load, slowly choking their course, which causes them to keep changing courses.

Embankments also instil a false sense of security and people occupy the flood plains till a breach occurs and disaster follows. The embankments of a river also prevent the tributaries from linking up.

Broadly, flood-control measures, that is the construction of embankments, initiated after the country's independence by the state government merely substituted the problem of flooding with one of water logging.

To add to it is the ever present threat of flooding caused by a breach in the embankment or the river overflowing it. Very frequently these two mix to produce a deadly cocktail.

In either situation -- water logging or flood -- the problem is acutely compounded by drainage congestion. While water logging makes the land unfit for agriculture flood water not being able to recede for a long time also destroys crops.

''Focus needs to be shifted from controlling floods to draining floods,'' says Ajay Dixit of the Nepal Water Conservation Foundation.

UNI

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