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The Rediff Special/Soroor Ahmed

After the drought, the deluge

This year the monsoon has started in Bihar with a bang. The very first rains flooded 550 villages in eight districts in north Bihar, displacing more than a million people and killing at least two dozen. Besides, there are reports of massive disruption of communication facilities, especially in Sheohar and Sitamarhi districts bordering Nepal.

According to official sources, the snow-fed rivers of north Bihar usually discharge up to 250,000 cusecs of water every second in the month of September. This year, however, they are discharging almost twice that amount in the first week of July itself.

For example on July 4 the Gandak was discharging 428,000 cusecs of water per second while the Kosi was discharging at the rate of 3,80,000 cusecs per second on July 2. The River Bagmati has crossed its all-time high recorded back in 1987.

Irrigation department officials say the devastation caused by the floods is less only because the Ganga, into which all these north Bihar rivers flow, had an acute shortage of water in the pre-monsoon days.

Though floods are an annual feature in Bihar, the monsoon has rarely got off to such a devastating start. Massive floods are often witnessed in later months, but this time the monsoon opened with a deluge because, according to a senior irrigation department officer, the catchment areas of the rivers in Nepal and the border districts of Bihar have received probably their heaviest rain in a century. A farmer from Madhubani district said rains had been continuing for a fortnight.

Bihar is the country's most flood-prone state with 76 per cent of the north Bihar population living in the danger zone. The gradual deforestation in Nepal has added to the problem as the rainwater flows very swiftly down to the plains.

Moreover, because of deforestation, siltation is taking place in the rivers much faster. As a result, the carrying capacity of the rivers is also being curtailed. Thus, it now takes only three days of heavy rain in the hills of Nepal for north Bihar to get flooded.

According to reports reaching Patna, the left embankment of the Kamla-Balan has been breached at one place while the embankments of the Adhwara group of rivers have been breached at two places by some local villagers.

The floods often cause law-and-order problems with local people often cutting the embankment according to their convenience. This worsens the problem elsewhere. While efforts are on to repair the damage caused to embankments by rainwater or the local people the rain is yet to cease in Nepal.

This is actually a perennial problem. Of the 5.4 million hectares of land in north Bihar, 900,000 hectares -- mostly in Darbhanga district -- remain waterlogged throughout the year, causing diseases like malaria, kala azaar and dysentery. Yet no one seems to have any solution to it. The local population has just learnt to live -- or die -- with it.

Irrigation experts are of the view that once this water-logging is removed, this land will help Bihar export foodgrain as silting has made it extremely fertile.

The problem with the North Bihar rivers, especially Kosi is that they meander beyond control. For example Kosi which used to flow east of Purnea about 200 years back has moved westward by 130 kilometres now. Keeping this change of course in mind efforts were made to embank the rivers.

But there does not appear to be unanimity about how to check the recurrent floods. The state water resources minister, Jagtanand Singh, as usual held the Centre responsible for this annual devastation.

He said there was no permanent solution to the flood problem till the Union government takes up the issue with the government of Nepal. How long will we continue to distribute relief and repair embankments, he asked. His views have the support of government officials and engineers who even support the construction of a high dam in Nepal.

However, irrigation experts like Dinesh Kumar Mishra, an engineer who runs Barh Mukti Abhiyan, is of the view that the official policy of embanking rivers further compounds the miseries of the people and prevents the rain waters accumulated in the fields from going into the river once the water starts receding. He calls for the construction of better drainage facilities.

But old timers like retired rehabilitation department employee, Arun Jha Nirala, recalls that the taming of rivers by embanking them have changed the situation for the better. Now, the farmers having five to ten acres of land are much better off. It is another thing that denudation in Nepal besides absence of any other measure to check the cascading waters are increasing the pressure on the plains of Bihar.

An irrigation department official who wished not to be quoted cited an example to buttress his point as to how embankments have changed the face of the economy of the region. According to him the former Bihar chief minister, Dr Jagannath Mishra and his elder brother and former Union minister, late Lalit Narayan Mishra, had to bid good bye to their ancestral village in Saharsa district and settle at their sister's place during their student days.

This simply because the entire stretch of land east of Kosi -- Saharsa and Supaul districts -- used to be so badly ravaged by the annual floods that it was impossible for their parents to do farming. Till they crossed Kosi and settled on its western bank in Madhubani district they were penniless farmers though the family then had jointly about 1000 acres of land.

As if that was not enough the Ganga Waters Agreement with Bangladesh affected none of the Indian states except Bihar. During the summer season the rivers of Bihar, including Ganga, face acute water shortage while in the rainy season it becomes the opposite.

Against the snow-fed rivers of North Bihar plains the rain-fed rivers which, after rising in the hills of Chotanagpur in South Bihar or even south-eastern Madhya Pradesh, criss-cross the central Bihar plains to fall in Ganga at various points, often witnesses massive flash flood. These rivers remain without water for most of the time save in monsoon.

This is not the first time that Bihar has been totally neglected. When Jawaharlal Nehru visited North Bihar in 1953 he announced a big project over Kosi so that the river could be tamed and water stored. Even as the debate over the best way to utilise the water went on the entire project was shifted to Punjab where the Bhakra-Nangal dam soon came up. The people of Bihar were left to fend for themselves.

Senior officials of the water resources department are of the view that a high dam in Nepal may help check floods in Bihar. But the question is who will bell the cat, that is, who would persuade Nepal as it is least bothered about floods in North Bihar.

They can have only one interest. Once the high dam is constructed Nepal may become a leading electricity producer, but then the whole project involves hundreds of millions of rupees. Besides, the Chinese lobby in Nepal, according to the Indian officials, do not want to have such dam built.

Moreover, the anti-dam lobby in India is strongly opposed to any big dam because the region falls under the sesimic zone. Besides, according to Mishra one missile attack on the proposed dam by the Chinese during any future war will wipe out the whole of North Bihar.

Another anti-dam activist, Anil Prakash, questioned the wisdom of demanding a big dam in Nepal by stating that if an earthquake in Assam can pulverise a hill near Guwahati how can one guarantee that the dam will withhold the devastation.

According to him that hill was devastated in the earthquake of August 15, 1950. Instead of a hill one can see a golf course in that particular place, he added.

The Rediff Specials

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