Sorrow of Bihar

(Published in Banking Services Chronicle October 2008)

In our childhood the textbooks taught us that the river Kosi was the “sorrow of Bihar”. Our textbooks have a bad reputation for being outdated or irrelevant. It was somewhat in this light that we took the epithet given to Kosi. It was only as much real for us as Hwang-Ho being the “sorrow of China.”

But this August millions of people in north-eastern Bihar witnessed a doomsday scenario first hand. We were jolted out of our stupor and made to realise how near-extinct facts given in our textbooks can come alive anytime. The Kosi flood, approriately declared a “national calamity”, is probably the worst recorded in the history of modern India.

The media, though somewhat late, acquainted the nation with the veritable seas formed on land. Supaul, Madhepura, Araria and Purnia have become household names. We were shown how destruction is only a matter of days in vast swathes of land. We saw how technology is still in its infancy when it comes to tackling the might of nature. We witnessed how the goons and the greedy valued money over lives. There was also the tragi-comic element of politicians scoring brownie points in this hour of peril.

The water may have started receding and the land even dried by the time you read this. But the months to come will be a challenge for the Nitish Kumar government, whose good deeds have been literally washed away by the floods. Providing refuge to the deprived millions is not an easy job. Controlling epidemics that may break out in the aftermath of the flood will not be easy either.

That is for the short term. In the long term, there are several pressing questions on which all of us must ponder. One, is the course changed by the river going to remain so in the years or decades to come? Two, do we have embankments enough to check the rivers from becoming a curse? Three, is it enough to build embankments without caring for maintenance? Four, do we need to control rivers or manage them? And finally, if a disaster occurs, shouldn’t we have an agile response system in place?