More than a million people have been forced from their homes and 250,000 houses destroyed in one of the worst floods in northern India for decades, sparking accusations that the destruction was man-made.
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Described by the country’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, as a “national calamity”, the flooding occurred after the Kosi river burst its banks in Nepal ten days ago, sending floodwaters across a swath of the eastern flank of the Himalayas and submerging large parts of the Indian state of Bihar.
Today the Indian army mobilised, evacuating more than 100,000 people and dropping food supplies from the air. Pratyaya Amrit, Bihar’s secretary for disaster management, said that a further 300,000 people would be moved to relief camps in the next 48 hours.
Experts have said that the flooding was not simply an act of nature, and that the failure of the Indian authorities played a large part in the making of the disaster. The Kosi river’s flood defences are supposed to be able to handle flows of almost a million cubic feet of water per second. Yet they were breached when the flows were a little more than a tenth of that capacity, pointing to serious defects.
Nepal, where the Kosi originates from, has accused the Indian government of failing to uphold its commitment under a 1954 treaty to maintain the river’s embankment. India countered that its engineers could not get access to river.
“We know the monsoon comes every year. Why weren’t they ready for the disaster? The fact is that there was much less flow in the river than the stated capacity which exposes the kind of maintenance that was done,” said Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the independent South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People.
Thakkar said that there was an “unfortunate lobby consisting of politicians, bureaucrats, builders and engineers who take money and don’t do any work. There is no oversight of this process. That’s why we get flooding every year.”
Relief agencies said that Bihar’s status as the poorest, most deprived state in India meant that victims of the annual monsoons were especially vulnerable.
“During our flood response last year we found that the levels of children trafficked from the state increased in large numbers. Two of the affected districts Arraria and Katiyar according to our study have the highest instance of child trafficking. The current disaster will increase levels of poverty and desperation and create a favourable environment for traffickers,” said Thomas Chandy, CEO of Save the Children.
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Source: Guardian.co.uk
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