No one’s ashamed!

Despite a long history of incompetent governments, corruption and mass tragedies, no one is held responsible for the Kosi breach

Dinesh Kumar Mishra Patna

Yamuna Prasad Mandal, MP, expressed his frustration over the breach of the western Kosi embankment on August 20, 1963 at Dalwa in Nepal and charged the state government at Patna on
September 4, 1963 that he had cautioned the government time and again about the impending disaster at Dalwa but nobody was bothered and he was "ashamed that no timely action was taken up". This was the inaugural breach in the Kosi embankments that were constructed in the late 1950s.

The engineers and politicians and local people were still rejoicing the taming of the river as the barrage was completed on March 31, 1963. This was a feather in their cap as they had controlled the vagaries of a river that had shifted about 160 km in the past 200 years. On August 9, 1963, Dr KL Rao, the then irrigation minister at the Centre, had expressed his concern over the situation that it was the first time that all the water of the Kosi had been made to pass through the embankments. If anything had gone wrong with these embankments the hopes of the people living in the Kosi basin would have been belied. It was for the first time that the local people could cross the river without boats and without risking their lives -- but their hopes were belied, for sure.

After the breach, the floodwaters had spread into Dalwa and started flowing to a depth of 15 to 45cm into the countryside through the gaps in the retired line and the western embankment. The floodwaters first fell into the Sakardehi river and flowed back into the Kosi through the Tiljuga. According to official sources, the land between the retired line and the western embankment was about only 52ha and there was waist deep water over 40ha in Dalwa. There were 47 families in this village with a population of 241. Of these, 92 persons from 22 families were shifted into tarpaulin tents at safer places on the embankment, according to official sources. Nobody had died in this accident.

Because of the international dimension of the breach, the situation remained tense and the government of India was informed of the eventuality. The responsibility of the breach was passed on to bad road conditions hampering the delivery of stones at the breach site and the rats and foxes that dig holes in the body of the embankments leading to its failure. Those were the good old days when politicians used to be ashamed of their failures. Clearly, they have ceased to express or feel an iota of shame with the passage of time.

Soon, the apologetic faces of our politicians changed and they became arrogant when faced with inconvenient truths like breaches in the embankments as Kosi started attacking the western embankment near Kunauli in 1967 on the Indian side of the border. In reply to a question by SM Bannerji about preventing breaches in the Kosi embankment, Dr KL Rao replied in the Lok Sabha on July 12, 1967: "In (the) case of a river nobody can say whether a breach will occur or not, and especially, in case of the Kosi, because the Kosi is all the time moving towards the west. It is on account of this peculiar nature of the Kosi that we have taken up the Kosi Project and this has prevented the river from moving and it has stayed in its place for the past ten years; it should have moved on to Jhanjharpur and nearer to Darbhanga."

This is what Dr Rao said in 1967. If he had said the same thing in 1954 after his visit to China to study the performance of the Hwang Ho embankments, the embankments on the Kosi would never have been built.