One Flood Report and Some Muddy Reviews

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The Third Citizens' Report on the State of India's Environment, which looks into the causes and effect of the annual floods on the lower plains of the Ganga-Brahmaputra basin, has attracted some decidedly hostile reviews. But the criticisms therein are disturbing more for what they reveal about the health of the Indian environment movement than for the considered analysis provided by the authors of the report.

The Third Citizens' Report represents a step ahead for CSE in many ways. Researchers concerned with upland-plains ecological linkages have long understood the correlation between various types of floods and deforestation in specific areas of the Himalaya. Unfortunately, the confused correlation put forward by Erik Eckholm, an American researcher and journalist, fired popular imagination and seriously set back public understanding of the ecological processes at work. Eckholm arrived two decades ago and in 1976 published a simplistic treatment of Himalayan soil loss which related all lowland floods with Himalayan deforestation.

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