Kosi’s Kiss

For decades, monsoons have almost always meant apocalypse now for the people of Bihar, while an inefficient and corrupt state machinery counts the cash
Dinesh Kumar Mishra Patna

A breach in the eastern Kosi embankment at Navhatta nearly 75km down the Kosi barrage in Saharsa was being discussed in the Bihar legislative council on September 14, 1984. Participating in the debate, Dr Sharda Prasad Singh had accused the state government saying, "The spot where the Kosi has breached its embankment is located in the lower area. If the carelessness continues the way it did this year, the day is not far when the Kosi would breach the embankment upstream of the barrage, north of Birpur... then the resulting flood and diversion of water into Ganga will bring unprecedented devastation to the Bhagalpur division." Thereafter, Shiv Nandan Prasad Singh added, "When this embankment was being built while I was a child, I remember the intellectuals of the area used to say that one day the entire area of Saharsa and Madhepura would be swept away and dumped into the Bay of Bengal." He used very harsh words blaming the chief minister for the devastation.

Every word of Sharda Prasad Singh's statement proved prophetic when the river breached its embankment near Birpur, upstream of the barrage, on August 18, 2008.

Pointing fingers at the Centre 26 years after the Navhatta breach, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said, "The Centre helped the drought-stricken people of Bundelkhand as well as the people of West Bengal and Mumbai mauled by floods. But what is the fault of the Kosi people that the Centre refused to help them though they were devastated by floods in August 2008, notwithstanding the prime minister's statement that it was a natural disaster? We helped the marooned people and have already submitted a rehabilitation package of Rs 14,800 crore, but the Centre is silent over the demand." He was addressing a gathering on April 3, 2010, at Birpur, the headquarters of the Kosi project, where he had come to inaugurate the Rs 751 crore renovation project of the Eastern Kosi Main Canal (EKMC).

His frustration was authentic as the 2008 floods had hit five districts, 35 blocks, 412 panchayats, 993 villages, 33.29 lakh people and 3.68 lakh hectares of land, destroying 2,22,754 houses and killing 527 persons and 19,323 cattle. If it were 1984, the leaders would surely have blamed him for the disaster. Never before in the known history of the Kosi was so much damage done in a single year and never had so many people died in a single stroke of floods in the basin with nobody to take the blame.

The chief minister used the occasion to reiterate his promise of creating 'Sundar Kosi' (beautiful Kosi). One wonders why 527 people had to lay down their lives to catch his attention and promise the dream of a Sundar Kosi. Moreover, far from speaking the whole truth, he had nothing to say about the abject failure of the state machinery in maintaining the embankment that had led to this disaster in the first place.

The rehabilitation of people affected by the 2008 floods is far from complete as there is no money to do it the way it was desired. Most of the victims have already braved the winters and rains of 2008 and 2009 under some makeshift arrangement, and the much publicised relief - for instance, the grant for desilting the fields over which sand has been deposited subsequent to the breach at Kusaha - is yet to reach them. A trip along the Birpur-Bathnaha Road or the EKMC speaks volumes about the failure of the state in restoring land for farming. The landscape still resembles the desert around Jaisalmer, except that the sand here is silver grey. Mass migration is an obvious corollary of such a tragedy, the MGNREGS not withstanding.