Not floods but criminal design failure

Sadananda Menon

Business Standard

Sept. 5, 2008

No one has pointed out that it was a 50-year-old time-bomb waiting to explode. Even as the first of this modern-Indian project of embanking the Kosi began in 1955, it was clear that a recipe for disaster had been drawn up and that Bihar was due for a jala-samadhi sooner or later.

There is an attempt to treat the August 18 breach in the eastern embankment of Kosi at Kusaha, on the Indo-Nepal border, as some kind of a unique, one-off event. As if this was a ‘natural disaster’ due to unusually heavy rainfall in the Himalayan slopes from where the river originates. Worse, as if Nepal was to blame, as it allegedly reneged on its commitments to maintain and dredge the barrage and the embankments on its side of the border due its preoccupation with the political change of guard there.

No one has so much as whispered that the maintenance of the barrage and the embankments is the responsibility of the engineers of the Bihar Water Resources Department. Demonising Nepal is one of those convenient blame games the media likes to indulge in and it is not new, in the context of a drowning Bihar. In earlier years too such accusations have been made along with contradictory proposals to seek multi-national corporate investments to build and operate mega dams on the Nepal part of the river, particularly the Kosi High Dam at Barahkshetra.

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