This year, the monsoon in Nepal was extended by nearly a month and ran into late September. It finally bid farewell with an extended four-d...
This year, the monsoon in Nepal was extended by nearly a month and ran into late September. It finally bid farewell with an extended four-day spell of rainfall (jhari) over the Kosi river catchment in east Nepal. As the curtain closed on the rainy season, it was time once again to breathe a sigh of relief that the Kosi embankment had not broken. The lives and livelihoods of millions in a strip of the Nepali plains and downstream Bihar and had been spared.
Given the governmental inertia in Patna, Delhi and Kathmandu, a calamity on the Kosi flats seems inevitable. When it strikes, it will not be a natural disaster but a largescale human-made catastrophe. The tragedy will be the result of what is euphemistically called “river engineering” and what an angry activist calls “hydraulic despotism” – a colonial-era holdover that continues to guide South Asia’s water bureaucracy. The structures it has built on the Kosi and continues to maintain poorly are by far the worst examples of technological arrogance in this part of the world.
The groundwork for the inevitable tragedy was laid nearly 70 years ago, when the great North Bihar flood of August 1953 spurred the leaders of newly independent India to imprison the...
