DEVELOPMENT-INDIA: Dam Discharge Maroons Millions

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jul 19 2001 (IPS) - A million people were marooned in eastern India’s Orissa state Thursday by floods caused by incessant rains but worsened by authorities discharging waters from the world’s longest dam, the Hirakud, into the Mahanadi river delta.

In a statement, Orissa state chief secretary D.P. Bagchi said the discharge effected on Wednesday was unavoidable since “we must ensure the safety of the Hirakud Dam”.

The dam, which has a spectacular 21 kilometre-long motorable dyke, entraps Asia’s largest freshwater lake with a 640 km shoreline.

As anticipated, the 850,000 cusecs of water released from the dam through its sluice gates exacerbated floods in the thickly populated coastal towns and villages of Orissa.

Special Relief Commissioner Hrishikesh Panda, who is in charge of relief in the disaster-prone state, confirmed that at least a million people were currently marooned and said the situation was rapidly worsening because of incessant rains.

Panda said over telephone that relief supplies were being airdropped or ferried to marooned people in boats with the help of the army, but said he did not expect normalcy to return to the state inside of a week.

According to the United News of India (UNI) news agency reporting form the state capital of Bhubaneshwar, at least five million people were affected by the floods and 40 people have perished.

Orissa began evacuating hundreds of thousands of people from the coastal areas, which have been flooding up a week ago as a result of unusually heavy rains this monsoon season. The monsoon begins in June and ends in September.

Air force officials here said a fleet of its helicopters and heavy-lift aircraft are now airdropping food packets and supplies to the marooned people, but operations were hampered by poor visibility in driving rain.

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has also announced relief worth a billion dollars to help the impoverished state cope with floods, even as critics lashed out at the government’s ability to handle disasters.

Bijaya Mahapatra, leader of the opposition regional party the Orissa Gana Parishad (OGP) or Orissa People’s Party blamed the management of the Hirakud Dam for the floods, which he said was the result of suddenly discharging it in an “unscientific manner”.

After touring the worst-affected Kendrapara and Jagatsinghpur districts, Mahapatra also accused the government, led by Chief Minister Navin Patnaik, of “complete failure in carrying out rescue and relief operations”.

Mahapatra has demanded that the army be called in to rescue millions of people marooned without food or safe drinking water on rooftops and available high points on the vast Mahandai delta.

Television footage taken from helicopters showed at least 10,000 people strung out along an elevated expressway near the port town of Paradeep, which was flattened by a supercyclone that hit Orissa coast in October 1999.

Officials in the Union Agricultural Ministry in New Delhi, which is responsible for managing disasters, confirmed several breaches in the Mahanadi river and said a team has been rushed to Orissa.

The floods, the latest in a series of cyclones, floods and droughts which ravage Orissa with monotonous regularity, have put to test a plan for natural-disaster preparedness put together with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

“Recurrent vulnerability to natural calamities is a critical dimension of the state’s poverty profile and I am glad that the U.N. system is collaborating with us to augment disaster preparedness and management,” Patnaik said when the state was hit by severe droughts earlier this year.

Devastating drought and floods in succession in Orissa, which adjoins Andhra Pradesh state, and other parts of the country, have called into question the efficacy of India’s vaunted disaster warning systems.

In August last year after Andhra Pradesh suffered from severe floods, Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu blamed the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) for wrongly predicting scanty rainfall in the state.

India is one of the few countries in the world which, for some years now, has been using space technology for near real-time monitoring of droughts, floods and cyclones.

However, this is yet to translate into benefits for ordinary people because of poor information management, say experts.