ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN-INDIA: Eroding Rivers Wreak Havoc in Eastern India

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Subir Bhaumik

QUTUBPUR, India, May 30 1998 (IPS) - Two silt-laden, turgid rivers are rapidly changing course in easten India, and threatening to submerge villages and towns, and fertile farmlands, both in India and Bangladesh.

Ancient hamlets like Qutubpur that have prospered on farming for centuries, have lost chunks of cultivable land to the Ganga and its tributary Bhagirathi, which are now, only a little more than one km from each other at Qutubpur.

Scores of panic-stricken peasant families have fled the village, because of the “merciless” erosion by the rivers, that has eroded their capacity to feed themselves.

“Our village is being sandwiched between the Ganga and the Bhagirathi. At this rate, it will vanish soon and the two rivers will merge and become one,” said Aminul Islam, who has lost three acres of fertile paddy land in the last two years.

Muhammed Selim has been reduced to a pauper, having lost all his farmland to the river. “I am a beggar now, I work as a sharecropper in other people’s fields. Five years ago, I was the owner of four acres of very good paddy land,” laments Selim.

Worried experts like hydrologist Dhruva Ghoshal say the Ganga and Bhagirathi are swiftly merging, threatening the “lower parts of West Bengal including Calcutta” — or the combined water could flow into eighbouring Bangladesh. “Whichever way this water passes through, it would mean disaster,” he warned.

Some 48,000 hectares of good farm land have vanished in the last five years in West Bengal alone. Both rivers are worshipped as sources that sustain life, but here they have turned vengeful and destroyers.

The township of Jalangi, north of Calcutta, en route to Qutubpur, has lost its main market centre, the old police station and one school to the river. “They were just eaten away by this merciless river,” a local police official, Mriganko Banerji, said.

Across the border in Bangladesh, water experts are keeping a close watch on the Padma, as the Ganga is called in that country, which is ploughing a new path on its way to the sea in the Bay of Bengal.

According to a leading water expert in Dhaka, Ain-un-Nishat, “if the two rivers merge, large tracts of low lying land in the Bengal basin, whether in Bangladesh or in West Bengal, will be simply wiped out.”

Because no one is certain which way the merged river would flow, governments in West Bengal and Bangladesh have not been able to estimate the cost of losses, but they are pleading for urgent action.

India’s top hydrologist D.P. Agarwal advises the need for a master plan toprevent the impending calamity. “Throwing a few boulders here and a few boulders there would not help. This is a national calamity and the whole country should rise to the occasion to prevent the disaster,” he said.

West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu raised the issue during his meeting with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on May 18, and demanded the central government foot the major share of a 150 million dollar project to stop the rivers’ from changing course.

Under the project, the rivers’ embankments will be fortified and strengthened, with the dumping of iron nets filled with boulders where the erosion is at its worst. In some other places, concrete embankments are being considered.

However, people in the affected areas have little faith in the state government’s ability to move speedily with the implementation of the plan. They say that contractors who win the lucrative project are likely to make a lot of money.

“If they dump 10 iron nets full of boulders, they will bill the government for 30. The (government) engineers (will) clear their payments because they get a cut,” alleges Hamid-ul-Sheikh of Qutubpur.

Atish Sinha, opposition leader, who belongs to Murshidabad, the district worst affected by river erosion, says th army should be brought in to carry out this anti-erosion project on a war footing. The opposition blames the state’s communist government, in power for close to two decades, for much of the problems.

“This state government is corrupt and incompetent. They just cannot handle a crisis of this magnitude and the centre should take charge and ask the army to implement the anti-river erosion projects,” he said.

As West Bengal’s panchayats (village councils) go to polls on May 28, the problem of river erosion dominates the campaign in the thousands of villages along the Ganga.

“The nuclear bombs will not save us. Vajpayee should ask his scientists to perform a miracle here,” said Shahid-ul-Haq of Domkal, a village near here.

People want to know if the government can keep the Ganga and the Bhagirathi apart. But there are no simple answers to this question, officials say, urging villagers to be patient and help them in working out a solution.