Know Kosi, know Bihar, know its curse

By Manish Anand

The truth of the damage of Bihar flood will take long time to come in the public domain. Flood is inundation of the human habitats, and people of Bihar grow with this experience. The outsiders can not understand it, as they do not know the pain and agony of being homeless and without food for days. Unfortunately, the people of Bihar, particularly of the districts affected in the current "catastrophic" flood, have always lived with the curse of the river Kosi, which has lived to its epithet of the sorrow of the state.

Thanks to The Times of India the nation came to know of the disasters in Bihar, as it dedicated a full page on the river Kosi which has reportedly left more than 25 lakh people homeless and without food as well. That's a hard thing to happen, anywhere in the world without a shred of doubt.

A non-journalist friend called and asked what the media is doing that there is no coverage at all in Delhi's paper. A real shame ! It reacted too late only when the state chief minister Nitish Kumar came to Delhi to explain the gravity of the situation. Poor chap, he was referring to the satellite images of 2004 pointing major breach in the embankment on the river Kosi on the Nepal side. The Central government had no time to take corrective measures.

The people outside Delhi always abuse Biharis for crowding their cities. They should rather blame the river kosi which every year inundates the parts of the state from where people leave to other parts of the country to earn their bread and butter.

A Bihar minister told me that people in hundreds are taking refuge on the rooftop of any pucca building. The areas with acute poverty have mostly mud-thatched homes which easily wash away in floods. Even the state government is not aware of the number of people having been washed away. Add to that the warning that in the next three months the situation will only aggravate as more than 20 lakh cusecs of water will be released compared to the current 1.46 lakh cusecs of water.

The Indian government had been busy pushing through its Indo-US nuclear deal, while the river Kosi was preparing to spell a pall of doom on Bihar. The nuclear deal is important as India needs more sources of power. It's a different story that it could never think of tapping the hydro power that the rivers originating from Nepal have the potential of. Despite the floods being an annual feature, the Indian government remains clueless to solve the perennial problem. It's a criminal negligence on the part of the Indian government that more than 25 lakh people in Bihar look into a dark future, plagued with water borne diseases, hunger, deaths, destruction of livelihood, and everything that life is all about.

The scale of rehabilitation once the relief and rescue operations are completed will be too monumental for the state government to undertake. As the course of the river Kosi has changed which now takes away the hundred years of human habitats, there will be need to develop new villages altogether. That will easily break the bone of any of the state government.

After a month the people outside the state will forget the curse of Bihar. The poor state will be left to its fate. And another 20 lakh people will head to other states in search of livelihood and safe shelters. That's the story of hundreds of years which took the Biharis away from the state.

(The photograph is of Aftab Alam Siddiqui/Associated Press. Apology for using the photograph without permission.)