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By Rashme Sehgal While the Centre and the Bihar state wrangle over who should repair the destroyed embankments, those displaced by the recent floods seem destined to spend the winter in the relief camps
One month after the Kosi river breached its embankments in north Bihar causing widespread devastation, the state government wants the central government to undertake the gigantic task of plugging the breach. Traditionally it has always been the Bihar government that has taken up the annual job of repairing embankments and all other work associated with floodwater management. Meanwhile, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has set up a high-level committee headed by Central Water Commission Chairman A K Bajaj to probe the whole issue of the Kosi breach -- including looking into its causes -- in the eastern Kosi afflux embankment. Bihar’s water resources minister Bijendra Prasad Yadav, whom the people of Bihar hold responsible for the breach in the Kusaha dam that rendered over 3 million people homeless (he is reported to have given the annual repair of embankments contract to a close relative), believes that the high-level committee was set up only to harass the state government. He feels there was no need to set up another committee, as Chief Minister Nitesh Kumar had already ordered an inquiry into the matter. The inquiry will be headed by former chief justice of the Patna High Court, Justice (retd) Rajesh Walia. Yadav maintains that the Centre has put the Bihar government in the dock by setting up the Bajaj Committee, and so it should not initiate the repair work. But, he says: “If the breach is not plugged soon, the continuous flow of silt in the waters will turn these vast fertile areas into a sandy desert. This will make the reconstruction work even more difficult.” Chief Minister Nitesh Kumar has written to the prime minister stating that the Centre must undertake the repair work in view of these controversies. “The prime minister has been impressed upon to secure technical recommendations from experts in the central committee of water resources in relation to the sealing of the breach and construction of a pilot channel to revert the course of the Kosi river, since the state government has no stake in the process,” the letter says. Union minister Jai Prakash wrote back to say that it was the state government’s responsibility to begin the plugging work. “We informed them last month itself that 10,000 concrete porcupines were available at the Farakka barrage that could be transported to the worksite within 10 hours.” Likewise, the bickering over financial allocations has begun. While the state government, after doing a recce, demanded that the Centre provide it with an ameliorative package of Rs 8,922 crore. The Centre appointed special taskforce chairman S C Jha to determine a rehabilitation and reconstruction package. Meanwhile, ex-chairman of the Ganga Flood Control Commission Nilendu Sanyal has been appointed chairman of the Kosi Breach Closure Advisory Board (KBCAB) set up by the state government; the Centre has also appointed him on its high-level team headed by Bajaj. Eighty-year-old Sanyal has declined becoming a member of the central government team, saying he was happy being a member of the KBCAB. In a report submitted recently to the Bihar government, Sanyal pointed out: “The progress of armouring the cut ends is unsatisfactory. The contractor has not turned up. No boulder is available at the site. Only meagre flood fighting is being carried out during the day, though round-the-clock work is required.” Sanyal added that India did not have the technology to plug a breach when the flow of water was 80,000 cusecs, as in the Kosi’s case. Any repair work done could be washed away. Still, the government’s dream of embarking on mega projects refuses to die. During a series of meetings held between Minister for Water Resources Saifuddin Soz and his Nepalese counterpart Bishnu Prasad Paudel, the two governments agreed to construct two massive dams on the Kosi river in an attempt to tame it. The two dams, called the Saptakosi and the Sumposi, S C Jha revealed, will be built at a cost of over Rs 40,000 crore. A fact-finding team of engineers that visited the Bhimnagar barrage on the Kosi river inside Nepal earlier this year, found the barrage in a dilapidated state. Dr Sudhirendar Sharma and other members of the team had warned that the east and west bank canals emanating from the barrage were choked with silt, as a consequence of which their irrigation capacities had been considerably reduced. Work on the breach can only begin when discharge from the river is down to 3 lakh cusecs. Going by the Kosi’s past flow patterns, this will happen only by next January, so experts see little likelihood of the breach being plugged before March 2009. The question many experts are asking is should the Kosi river be allowed to flow along its new course? Victims of the flood oppose this suggestion as do thousands who remain marooned and continue to live in their homes, surviving on meagre rations and contaminated water. Ram Prakash, a farm labourer from Jirwa village who chose to stay on the roof of his house for almost three weeks after the river was breached, was forced to move by a team of army jawans. “They were apprehensive that with the waters receding and with rotting carcasses strewn around, our water sources had become contaminated making us prone to several waterborne diseases especially since the water level here is very high,” Prakash pointed out. What concerned him, as it did thousands of other villagers who were forced out of their homes, was the fact that there had been no let-up in the rains. “Our crops have been destroyed. Our village has lost most of its cattle. How are we going to prepare for the rabi crop,” Prakash asks. He, along with others in his village, has decided to move to the city in search of a job. “When the waters do finally recede and if we can salvage our land we will return to grow our winter crop,” he says. Meanwhile, the state government is trying to buy time by putting the onus of repairing the breach on the central government. Senior bureaucrats admit privately that the breach cannot be plugged before April, which means that victims of the flood will have to weather the winter in relief camps. With this in mind, the government should plan to house people in semi-permanent camps for around nine months; proper reconstruction and resettlement work will only really start after that. Senior Bihar bureaucrat Pratyam Amrit, who heads the National Disaster Management Authority in Patna, points out: “Once the water recedes, we will have to launch a massive reconstruction and resettlement project whereby we will have to provide all the infrastructure of roads, irrigation, power lines, hospitals and schools in these flood-affected districts.” What will be even more difficult is rebuilding the 866-odd villages that have been destroyed. For one, people will have lost their land deeds making proof of ownership extremely difficult. The Fact Finding Mission recently released a report titled ‘Kosi Deluge: The Worst is Still to Come’, in which it stressed that embankments straitjacket the river. In the case of the Kosi, it found that because of siltation the river bed was in fact several feet higher than the adjoining land. The high and low lands separated by embankments have created a situation where the low lands have become permanently waterlogged. Sixteen per cent of the land mass of north Bihar is subject to permanent waterlogging. Engineers on board the Mission cite how the Dutch government has arrived at the conclusion that absolute safety from flooding cannot be assured through technical/infrastructural measures. It now advocates spatial flood protection measures that allow “room for the river” so that empty land is allowed to absorb the flood waters. As Mishra says: “Engineering alone cannot stop the natural process. We need to come up with a white paper on current policies that have caused a huge increase in flood-prone areas. The paper must take into account the Kosi’s meandering nature, coupled with its maximum energy producing currents, for river basin management based on a comprehensive assessment of the river system.” InfoChange News & Features, October 2008
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