ENVIRONMENT-SOUTH ASIA: Flood-taming Brings Another Season of Misery

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 11 2000 (IPS) - Once again, the big Himalayan rivers are overflowing their banks in the plains of north and eastern India, and Bangladesh, uprooting the lives of millions of people.

Scores of people have been killed and tens of thousands of hectares of farm land devastated by floods in the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers and their tributaries, which flow across China, Nepal, Bhutan, India and Bangladesh before emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

Even as the Indian army and air force rescue flood-marooned villagers and drop food packets to people camping on high river embankments, environmentalists blame short-sighted measures to tame the annual flooding.

Independent river experts and activists campaigning against official flood control policy, have long argued that the thousands of kilometres of embankments along these rivers in India and Bangladesh, have caused rather than contained floods.

Environmental degradation and human interference in Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and even China, are adding to the havoc, they say.

Early August flash floods in India’s northern Himachal Pradesh state, caused by water-laden hurricanes sweeping in from the Tibetan plateau, destroyed bridges and cut off the picturesque tourist destinations of Kinnaur and Kullu.

Meanwhile, the Indian government is pointing the finger at environmental degradation in China, for the floods in the Brahmaputra.

Agriculture Minister Nitish Kumar told parliament that environmental damage in Chinese territory caused the unprecedented flood in the north-eastern border state of Arunachal Pradesh, where the river enters India after travelling across the Tibetan plateau.

Kumar said that New Delhi has taken up the issue with Beijing.

According to official estimates, floods in Bhutan, Nepal, India and Bangladesh, have killed some 300 people.

Reports from Bhutan said flash floods toppled several multi- storeyed buildings in Phuntsholing, the main commercial centre in the mountainous country, killing at least 50 people.

In Bangladesh, at least half a million people were affected by the flooding, which was expected to worsen in the coming days. The deltaic nation forms a geographical funnel for the passage of the two Himalayan rivers into the sea.

The regional office of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies estimates that 3.1 million people have been affected in India’s northeastern Assam state and another 1.6 million in the eastern Bihar state, which borders Nepal.

India’s Central Water Commission estimates that 1.5 million people in more than a thousand villages in Bihar’s northern region have been displaced from their homes by the swirling waters.

For over a week, in Bihar’s worst-hit districts of Sitamhari, Sheohar and Muzzaffarpur, people have been living on river embankments, dependent on supplies dropped by air force helicopters.

This year’s flood devastation is said to have again put a question mark on the wisdom of building embankments along the Himalayan rivers, and big multi-purpose dams upstream to tame these rivers.

For the past 50 years, successive state governments in Bihar, which bears the brunt of the annual flood fury in the Himalayan Kosi river flowing down from Nepal, have advocated a high dam upstream to hold back the excess water.

However, Dinesh Kumar Mishra, a leading critic of embankments and big dams as flood control measures, says the proposed Kosi dam will worsen the flooding.

Embanking heavily silt-laden Himalayan rivers leads to a progressive raising of the river bed, making necessary, matching increases in the embankment’s height. A point comes when the river is actually flowing above the level of the surrounding land.

When such a river breaches the embankment’s mud wall, the damage can be severe as happened in the mid-1980s in Bihar, says Mishra, who leads the Barh Mukti Abhiyan (Freedom From Floods Movement).

Mishra traces the history of embankments to India’s former British colonial rulers, who, however, soon realised the folly of this as a flood control measure.

“The British learned from the experience of the river Hwang Ho in China, embanked in the seventh century and the Mississippi (in the United States), which caused floods year after year, after it was embanked in the 18th century,” Mishra said.

After independence in 1947, India and the former East Pakistan — now Bangladesh — embarked on a massive embankment building spree along the tributaries of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra.

Breaches in the embankments along these rivers in Bihar and Assam are estimated to have killed nearly 300 people this year.

According to Promode Gogoi, Assam’s flood control minister, there are already 54 breaches in various embankments across the state. Many of these have been made by locals to save their own villages.

More than 200 marooned villagers had to airlifted in Assam, which straddles the Brahmaputra valley.