IN FOCUS

Agony of the Inundated
The Tasks Ahead

Over 800 villages underwater, nearly 3.5 million affected and the real extent of the tragedy that is unfolding across North Bihar yet to  become apparent. It will take decades for the people of the region to recover from the trail of destruction and devastation left behind by floods unleashed by the river Kosi.

It is not that the river of sorrow has indulged in the dance of death and devastation on its own, the fact is that it is the result of human intervention rather than the fury of a river in spate.

Two major questions arise in the context of the Kosi floods. First, the manner in which we manage our water resources, and second, the response to such calamities that we know are becoming more frequent.

As Himanshu Thakkar observes that, "…there is plentiful and mounting evidence that structural measures have been largely ineffective in controlling India's floods, and in fact, have worsened flooding in many parts of the country."

Embankments are basically flood transfer mechanisms; they quickly transfer the floods from a given area to downstream areas. The  floods resulting when embankments are breached are thus very different from natural flood - as in the case of the Kosi. The way out of this embankment oriented 'hard' approach which is based on the idea that nature can be confronted, constrained and made to do humanity's bidding is to look at the `soft' approach, which argues for a more sophisticated set of techniques, of flood-risk management which aims to understand, adapt to and work with the forces of nature.