Bihar's annual sorrow

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Sep 4th 2008 | DELHI
From The Economist print edition

With some justice, the government gets the blame for a natural disaster

EPA

Looking for dry landAS NEW ORLEANS survived the worst Hurricane Gustav could throw at it, the scale of devastation wrought by another natural fury was becoming horribly apparent. On August 18th the monsoon-swollen river Kosi, a Ganges tributary that flows from Nepal to India, burst an embankment on the Nepali side of the border and flowed into a channel it had abandoned a century earlier. The water gushed into hundreds of villages in the Indian state of Bihar, killing an unknown number and displacing more than 3m, many of whom have been marooned on roofs, trees and tiny islands of dry land. Hundreds of thousands are living in makeshift camps.

South Asia’s monsoon rains kill hundreds every year. This summer they have been especially severe, killing nearly 2,000 people in India since June, according to government’s National Disaster Management Division. That total will soon double, at least. Many of the deaths occurred in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. In north-eastern Assam, floodwaters have submerged over a thousand villages and imperilled the state’s rare one-horned rhinoceroses, which have fled a national park for higher ground, putting them within easier reach of poachers. In Bangladesh, flooding has cut off at least 50,000 people.

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But the effects of the monsoon in wretchedly poor and overcrowded Bihar have been especially grim. The Kosi floods the plains here so often it has become known as the “sorrow of Bihar”. Even so, the river’s diversion meant it hit villages rarely affected by flooding and unprepared to deal with it. Television showed despairing farmers herding their starving cattle into the river to die and men throwing punches as they tried to board tightly packed rescue boats. Food stores have been ransacked as people have fed their children grass. Bihar’s chief minister, Nitish Kumar, has described the situation as “not a normal flood, but a catastrophe”.

As is inevitable in India, local authorities have been blamed for failing to get help to victims fast enough; a shortage of boats has held back efforts to evacuate those stranded by submerged roads and railway lines. But aid agencies say the central government has been quick to act, pledging $228m to the relief effort and sending 3,000 soldiers into the area.

Probably more pertinent are the criticisms levelled at India and Nepal for failing to manage the river’s famously erratic flow, a responsibility they share. Environmentalists say silt should have been cleared from the river bed months ago and that too many high embankments have caused undue pressure during the monsoon months. The worst negligence may have occurred more recently than that: local engineers claim that faxes they sent warning of imminent calamity were ignored in Bihar’s capital, Patna, because the relevant bureaucrat was on leave.