The people vs the environment

Cover

Officials in India keep reviving the dead debate on floods – to the detriment of local communities and the national exchequer.

While inaugurating a seminar on floods in 1937, Bihar Governor Maurice Hallett said that, looking back over engineering records from the previous six decades of the floods that had taken place, ‘22 percent are sub-normal, 55 percent are normal, 22 percent are abnormal and only two percent are extremely abnormal. In other words, the dwellers in India can expect to be flooded rather badly once every five years, on the average, and to have a really dreadful flood once every fifty years or so.’ Those were the good old days, when rainwater did not have many obstructions to its free flow. Today, to the contrary, Bihar has nearly 3600 km of embankments, and its area considered flood-prone has nearly tripled from 250,000 hectares in 1952 to more than 688,000 hectares (in 1994). Add to this the 368,000 ha of so-called ‘flood-protected land’ that was flooded in the 2008 breach of the Kosi River, the flood-prone area in the state actually comes to some 724,800 ha.

In 1953, a multipurpose scheme was sanctioned to embank the Kosi river, ostensibly to protect 214,000 ha of land from flooding and irrigating 712,000 ha of agricultural land in India, with benefits to Nepal. This brought the debate of floods and embankments to an end, because the Kosi was the most vibrant river of Bihar, notorious for changing its course. This is similar to all other major rivers in north Bihar, due to their heavy sediment load coming down from the Himalaya – and, thus, a huge mass of loose soil forming a major portion of their catchment. It is specifically because of this sediment that over time the Kosi had shifted from Purnia to Darbhanga, the Bagmati has shifted from Kamtaul in Darbhanga to Sheohar, and the Mahananda had been swinging between Malda in West Bengal to Katihar in Bihar. The Kamala has also come from west of Jaynagar in Madhubani to east of it, and the Bhutahi Balan justifies its name (bhutahi means ‘ghost’), because no one knows when and where the river will strike.

Waterway: Kishun Devi Yadav looks at the inundated section that was once the East West Highway, in the Nepal Tarai, October 2008. She had been forced to make the arduous crossing the previous month in order to deliver her baby in Biratnagar. Now, she waits to make the same perilous journey in order to bring her 10-day-old baby back home to Kanchapur in Saptari.
Photo: Edwin Koo

The British were against building embankments on all of these rivers. They worried that doing so on a sediment-laden flow would lead to a rise of the riverbed; obstructing drainage would result in water-logging of the surrounding ‘protected’ countryside; and seepage through the embankments would only add to problems that their technical knowhow could never completely guarantee against. For the British, this constituted the bald economics of flood control: If an embankment were to breach, the expenses of relief, rehabilitation and repairs would offset the benefits of flood control accrued over years, and hence embanking such rivers was a drain on the exchequer. Instead, the British were in favour of ‘leaving the rivers to their own devices’, and improving the drainage of the country as far as practicable.

There are of course some engineers and activists today who believe that the embankment strategy is deeply mistaken, given the specific morphology of the Ganga tributaries in terms of sediment load. Yet a 2002 report by the Bihar government suggests that these people who subscribe to such views have a colonial mindset. The ‘nationalist mindset’, on the other hand, would have you believe that if the same amount of water is made to pass through a smaller cross-section (which is what embanking a river results in), its velocity will increase and so will its ability to eat away at the banks and dredge the bottom of the river – thus increasing the waterway and reducing the floods. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatsoever to prove this.

As the embankment ideology is implemented, local communities are badly affected. Under this mentality, how are local communities being impacted by embankments? Villages become entrapped between the levees because the Bihar rehabilitation policy always assumed that only dwellings face problems when it comes to flooding – thus forgetting about agricultural fields, the only source of livelihood for most of these communities. While this has led to the relocation of families to outside the embankments – in so-called protected countryside – as part of rehabilitation packages, they were expected to till their lands within the embankments. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of successive floods since the construction of the embankments, lands outside of the embankments became water-logged, and most people returned to their original villages within the embankments.

Four categories

Unsurprisingly, out of 1230 ha of rehabilitation sites along the Kosi, today nearly 550 ha remain unoccupied. A sizable number of those displaced over fifty years ago are still living within the embankments, where their houses and agricultural lands remain exposed to the vagaries of the rivers. There are 414 villages within the Kosi embankments (380 in India, 34 in Nepal), with a population of nearly 1.2 million. In case of other rivers, 66 villages are within the Mahananda embankments, 95 in the Bagmati, 102 in the Kamala and 52 in the Bhutahi Balan. The number of villages within the Gandak and Ghaghara embankments is unknown. It is clear that even while the embankments are meant to save those outside, there is a huge mass of humanity within which is denied succour and justice.

One resident of Dumra in the Belsand block of Sitamarhi district, within the Bagmati embankments, compares his community’s existence to a theha, a piece of wood on which fodder is chopped. ‘With every strike of the fodder axe it loses life,’ says Shyam Bihari Singh. ‘That is exactly how we are forced to live within these embankments. Some new part of our lives is chopped off every year, and nobody ever bothers about us.’ One telling indicator of this is women’s literacy level within the Kosi embankments, which today is the same as the national rate for women at the time of Independence.

The second category of people affected by such river management is those who live on the other side of the embankments, in the ‘protected’ countryside. Typically, the floor and walls of their houses remain moist, their fields are often water-logged, and they live under constant threat of catastrophic breach during the rainy season. Numerous experiences, most recently on the Kosi at Kusaha, 13 km upstream from the Kosi barrage in 2008, have shown dramatically the ramifications of such a breach.

The third category is of those living on the crest of the embankments, who have a different tale to tell. (People from both the categories mentioned above throng on the embankments to find a safe place to live, some only for the rainy season and some for all times.) Their houses might have been eroded away by the river within the embankments, sand-cast or water-logged, or simply water-logged or washed away in case of a breach if the village was located outside the embankments in the protected countryside. They have come to live on the embankments because they have no other place to go. They are often literally bulldozed over in the name of maintenance, repairs and raising and strengthening the embankments, typically with no prior warning. In the meantime, no one ever asks whether engaging in such ‘raising’ and ‘strengthening’ does anything to stop the riverbed from rising; whether doing so prevents water-logging outside the embankments and erosion inside; whether doing so helps prevent seepage through the embankments; or whether there is any guarantee that the strengthened embankment will never breach. No one asks these questions because the answer to each is a firm ‘No’. And yet, the work goes on.

Then there are others who live far away from the embankments, whom flood waters do not reach even in the case of a breach. Out of harm’s way, they are not bothered about the river and its behaviour. Yet somehow, it is these people who are almost exclusively the ones who are vested with the responsibility of deciding what should be done to the river in terms of flood control or irrigation. In fact, the farther a person lives from the river, the more his voice seems to gain in value, at least as far as ‘river training’ is concerned.

Compensation looming

Finally, we should mention the other side of flood management: the issue of relief, rehabilitation and compensation. In the initial days, the people could be satisfied with some amount of relief and rehabilitation package in case of a breach in the embankment. The first demand for compensation – not relief – was most likely raised in the aftermath of the breach of the Kosi embankment at Nauhatta, in Saharsa district, in 1984. The matter eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in favour of the victims, but nothing happened. Petitions were subsequently filed, for this and later cases, but again with no result. This is where the matter stands today.

In fact, there has been some movement on the compensation issue, after years of wrangling between the governments of India and Nepal. It is important to note that maintenance of canals and embankments of all the joint projects of irrigation and flood control in Nepal is the responsibility of the Indian government, which it executes through the Water Resources Departments of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. In the aftermath of a July 2002 breach of an embankment on the Gandak near Tribeni Ghat (affecting lands in Nawalparasi of Nepal and parts of UP), the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu was eventually asked ‘to look into the possibility of compensatory measures against the damaged caused by land erosion and due to losses of crops.’

After a survey of the concerned villages by Nepal’s Irrigation Ministry, an official report named losses to 13 villages in Nepal totalling some INR 1.8 billion. As a result, in June 2010 the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Kathmandu formally requested the Indian government ‘to make the arrangement for providing the compensation as agreed earlier.’ Since all of this has taken place publicly, the assumption is that, in this case, some action will eventually have to be taken.

Yet, there is another aspect to the matter. If New Delhi pays this compensation, many are worrying that this will set a precedent for victims of similar problems in other river basins jointly shared between India and Nepal. How will this affect, for instance, compensation claims for the 371 breaches that the Bihar government has officially accepted have taken place in the past 24 years on almost all of its rivers, including the Kosi, Kamala, Gandak, Bagmati, Burhi Gandak and Mahananda?

Still, perhaps this matter of compensation for the inundated villages of Nepal and UP offers a rare opportunity to fight the embankment scourge. India’s flood-control policies – of which building embankments is an integral part – will squeeze the national and state exchequers of significant resources, because the government will not only have to arrange for money for constructing and repairing embankments but also for paying compensation. Is this, then, not an opportune moment to review the government’s flood-control policies, before entering into this blind and potentially extremely costly alley?

-- Dinesh Kumar Mishra is convener of Barh Mukti Abhiyan, in Jharkhand.

Add comment Email this article

JComments

Refugees of the Kosi 1 April 2001
By Dinesh Kumar Mishra
	Four decades ago, going against scientific wisdom, the dam builders of India...

The legends of Kosi 27 February 2009
By Dinesh Kumar Mishra
	Key lessons for dealing with the vagaries of the Kosi’s annual cycle are to...

Bihar’s embanking mindset 13 December 2008
By Dinesh Kumar Mishra
	The new administration in Patna is finally taking flood preparedness seriously,...

Finger in the dike 1 December 2008
By Dinesh Kumar Mishra
	While a timetable has now been announced for plugging the embankment breach...

People versus wildlife 17 May 2013
By Nirmal Ghosh
	Reassessing wildlife conservation policies in India.

After the flood 7 May 2013
By Danial Shah
	The new realities of life for villagers in Hunza Valley who lost their homes and lands to a natural lake following a 2010...

Disappearing foods 25 April 2013

	A collection of recipes that are fading from the Southasian palette.

Eat, drink, write 23 April 2013
By Suman Bolar
	A food writer dishes on the ins and outs of her profession.

Brideprice 22 April 2013
By Manik Bandopadhyay
	A new translation of Manik Bandopadhyay's ‘Namuna’ by Madhusree Mukerjee.

Among the believers 19 April 2013
By Abhishek Choudhary
	An account from Varanasi, where bhang and thandai struggle to survive the onslaught of LSD and Coca-Cola.

Behind the crystals 18 April 2013
By Rituparna Banerjee
	Capturing the lives of Marakkanam’s salt pan workers

In search of food sovereignty 17 April 2013
By K Sandeep
	Shifting the debate on the Public Distribution System.

Missing connections 8 April 2013
By Sarandha
	Girja Kumar’s book on the Indus and the cultures tied to it obscures a tremendous wealth of interconnected histories and...

No place for picnics 4 April 2013
By Freny Manecksha
	Kashmiri women tell their stories of the conflict.

'I bowled left-arm chinaman' 28 March 2013
By Jahnavi Barua
	Shehan Karunatilaka speaks about winning awards, spin bowling, italics in fiction, and much more.

The people vs the environment March 2011