INDO-GANGETIC PLAIN: SHROUDED IN MASS MISERY

Every year, about this time, we need to remind the leaders of society, academia and SAARC, about the Indo-Gangetic fog. Himal raised the matter a year ago ("Huddled masses, yearning for warmth", February 2001), and it should be repeated now, even though the prime ministers and presidents are probably not listening. This is truly a 'regional' problem.

There is increased incidence of the fog in the plains of the Indus and Ganga, due to the expansion of embankments, dykes, barrages, irrigation canals – and eveything else that leaves more water lying around on the ground in the winter months than what is natural. When the air temperature drops, these water bodies release mists and fogs, which then hug the ground and do not disperse for days, weeks and, in bad winters, a month or more.

Fog is basically a cloud formed at ground level, and during these winter months they extend several hundred feet into the atmosphere. Above the fog, the winter sun shines, but its warmth cannot reach the huddled masses underneath. Just a few hundred feet up into Uttaranchal, Nepal or the Darjeeling and Bhutan hills, the sun shines bright and warm. But this is cold comfort for the plainsfolk.

The overall impact of this Indo-Gangetic fog on the population must account for the biggest incidence of mass misery in the modern world. With their living spaces and clothing geared more for the long hot summer of the plains, the poor and not-so-poor, from Lahore to Delhi to Patna to Guwahati, shiver in un-heated rooms wearing inadequate woolens as the ground and air turn frigid. In the poor visibility, the trains run late and planes are diverted. The potato crop dies in the fields, and bricks will not bake in the sun's absence.

Why doesn't anyone listen? To repeat from Himal of a year ago, "The largest mass of people any where in the world lead affected lives under the cloud in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, voiceless for being so many and so problematic." You could also add that South Asia's rulers and opinion-makers are now, increasingly, living in climate-controlled spaces and traveling around in winter in heated vehicles. Meanwhile, the social science hereabouts is weaker than ever before, so the connection between the frigidity of the Indo-Gangetic maidaan and the mass misery index are just not linked to the developmental interventions, such as canals and levees. It is an absence of imagination.

Let us hope that some physical scientists and social scientists wake up before long to prove this hypothesis right or wrong – that increased winter waterlogging is what leads to the Indo-Gangetic fog. The proliferation of irrigation canals introduce more water away from the rivers, to feed fields given over to multiple cropping. In addition, there are the embankments that have come up on every major river, to keep it 'trained'. The levees also hold back the water that would otherwise have joined the river's flow. With much more water available on the ground, the thickness and duration of the fog is extended. The sun does not break through, which keeps the ground from heating up to dissipate the shroud.

There were 154 km of embankments in Bihar in 1954. In 1997, the state had 3500 km of embankments, so you can imagine the increase in waterlogging and therefore the fog. Had they thought about this when they contemplated irrigation and embankments? Doubtful. Did they expect that the population of the Indo-Gangetic basin (and add some more from the Brahmaputra basin as well) that is affected by the fog would top 500 million? No.

500 million people, or a good portion of it, suffering the frigidity of the Indo-Gangetic fog. It is enough to want you to do something about it. But who will raise the question, when to question em-bankments is to question irrigation, which is to question development itself, which is nothing less than being anti-national?