Bihar’s embanking mindset

Bihar has never been as well prepared to face floods as it is this year. This is partly because the Patna government, acceding to longstanding demands and also to avoid confusion over responsibilities, transferred responsibility for the maintenance of the state's river embankments last year from the Department of Revenue to the Water Resources Department. State officials also had Bihar's Disaster Management Department chalk out programmes to better equip the state's citizenry to face natural calamities – a move that some took as an indication that the state authorities were finally in agreement to face the problem of floods head-on.

Steps to address the problem were taken through to the end of last year, when state Water Resources Minister Ramashray Prasad Singh announced that intra-linking of Bihar's rivers would begin in April 2007, and an INR 8 billion proposal to embank the Bagmati in its middle reaches was sent to New Delhi for approval (see Himal March 2007, "The Bagmati's final sealing"). The state government also decided to allocate funds to raise and strengthen the Bagmati's existing embankments, while an INR 8.5 billion proposal to embank tributaries of the Mahananda River is also awaiting sanction from the Centre. Patna's plans even go beyond India's territory, extending to the repairing of embankments in Nepal. These changes, pushed through over the past several months by the Janata Dal (United)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) under Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, came after more than a decade of inaction on the part of earlier regimes. Nonetheless, they exhibit a depressing proclivity to maintain the disastrous focus of past administrations on embanking the state's rivers.