The river as system

Like the vagaries of nature, rivers too cannot be understood in isolation.

The Kosi River breached its eastern embankment at Kusaha in eastern Nepal on 18 August 2008, flooding the immediate plains of Nepal and northern Bihar. Satellite imagery showed a wide swathe of inundation, as the turbid waters moved southwards to join the Ganga. Even as the Indian and Nepali governments and engineers worked to force the river back to the course it had abandoned, the Barh Mukti Abhiyan of Bihar and Himal Southasian organised a meeting in Patna on 17 December to discuss the many aspects of the Kosi challenge.

Water experts, engineers, activists, policymakers, researchers and journalists from various parts of India and Nepal participated at the Patna meeting. They focused on the impact of the breach as well as the viability of the given alternatives: keeping the Kosi confined within the existing embankments; building a high dam in Nepal, and other possible engineering solutions; and attempting to integrate the historical experience of living with the flood in the plains, and adjusting livelihoods and infrastructure to the annual inundation. Questions raised at the Patna meeting were threefold. First, is it politically feasible to try to convince the plains people to go back to living with the flood, and focusing on its advantages in terms of siltation and fertility? Second, are embankments truly a boon, as they are presented, or do they actually represent a quick fix that entraps society into a false sense of security, even as river beds rise? Third, is the proposed Kosi high dam in the Nepali interior, with its massive reservoir and attendant inundation of the valleys, the ideal solution that it is portrayed – and what would be the fallout of the siltation of the reservoir over the course of decades? Some of these ideas are expanded upon in the two articles included in this special report, written by roundtable participants Devashis Chatterjee and Kalyan Rudra.

When wrestling with such complex issues, much discussion will be required before we grasp for solutions. Keeping this in mind, the meeting was organised as a forum in which committed experts and activists could share their views, away from the glare of the media spotlight and far from the deterministic positions of the state establishments of both India and Nepal.

One-point agenda
The Kosi is a river that swings like a pendulum over time as it travels downstream from where it emerges from the hills of Nepal, moving in a 120 degree arc across the Bihar plain. The silt that the river brings down forces it to shift every few decades. The river was at its westernmost track when it was suddenly straitjacketed in 1954. It was then that a barrage and a line of levees were put up on the two banks, which extend a hundred kilometres downstream. While this did protect the surrounding area from the monsoonal inundation, the plains people have been riding a tiger every since. Because the river has been unable to shift its course as normal, the river instead started flowing on a 'plateau' in relation to the surrounding land as the silt added up. Over five decades, between Chattara and Kursela, where the river meets the Ganga, the Kosi became a river at disequilibrium (see Himal, September 2008).

The breaking point of this increasingly dangerous imbalance came last August. In one fell swoop, the Kosi proved the idea of 'flood protection' to be a myth, leaving hundreds dead and more than two million people homeless, destroying some 250,000 homes and 247,000 acres of farmland.  Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared the floods a "national calamity", but despite this initial sense of urgency, the lack of attention to the Kosi disaster has been astounding. Despite the extent of human suffering, too few helicopters were diverted by the armed forces for rescue operations; the Indian national media's lack of coverage was shocking; and the work on plugging the breach at Kusaha dragged along slowly. It was only at the end of January this year that the Kosi was brought back to its pre-August 2008 course.

With the river now flowing along that old route, New Delhi, Patna and Kathmandu evidently consider the matter to be closed. Indeed, they appear to view the plugging of the breach as an end in and of itself, and perhaps there was really no other option in political or humanitarian terms. The matter is somewhat more complex, however, as the hope is that the various stakeholders and powerbrokers would seriously confront the issue, to find a sensible and durable 'solution' to the matter of the Kosi floods has been belied.

The opinions at the Patna interaction converged on the view that mainstream thinking on river management and engineering solutions have remained in a state of denial. This is truly an unfortunate state of affairs, considering the existence of significant evidence that supports alternatives to the current 'technology first' approach. The main flaw of this model lies in its exclusive reliance on dams, barrages and embankments. Even more dangerously, it is lax when it comes to studying the impact of these measures in terms of water-logging, loss of fertility and the drastic effects on the population living within the embankments – almost a million-strong, in the case of the Kosi.

The policy establishment in New Delhi and Patna continue to present a one-point agenda: a high dam on the Kosi as a 'permanent solution'. Naturally, populist pressures make it difficult for politicians to take another line of argument. But the idea of a high dam is merely a quick-fix option. As such, the idea of the Kosi high dam is one that needs to be discussed threadbare – from all angles and contemplating all ramifications – before the first earthmover is ever put to work. Too much is at stake to go about a project of such magnitude any other way. In this, the key questions that need to be answered are: What are the dangers of seismic upheaval? What will be the political, geopolitical and societal impacts of inundation in the Nepali hills? And, how does one do a judicious cost-benefit analysis of what is gained and what is lost across this border?

A viable alternative
Against the brute strength of the arguments for a high dam, there are voices in Bihar and elsewhere that question the logic of the plan. These activists and civil-society leaders have now had decades of experience with the inadequacies of technological and engineering solutions; they want, at the very least, open debate. This is a reasonable minimum criterion, and one that, crucially, emerges from their first-hand knowledge of the neglect that has taken place with regards to those living within the embankments, as well as the scattered 'oustees'. Similarly, they also understand the massive scale of corruption that guides and maintains grand engineering projects, while also being scientifically aware of the consequences of the relentless build-up of silt on the riverbed. On the other hand, alternative plans will involve complexities and long-term uncertainties that politicians who have to live in the here-and-now simply cannot consider.

At the Patna meeting, it was suggested that utilising the earlier channels of the Kosi could be one sustainable solution to mitigate flood disaster. By spreading the river back into these courses, smaller-scale inundation would occur in the area. A technological intervention of this scale would naturally require a bilateral agreement between Nepal and India, building infrastructure that would guide river waters deliberately into the landscape. No one says this option will be easy, but this could be the middle path between the non-sustainability of keeping the Kosi between the current embankments, and building a high dam that could be simply pushing the day of reckoning a few decades hence.

The general consensus in Patna was that the alternative methods of 'guiding' the flow of the Kosi River critically need further consideration, even while the high dam proposal remains on the table. To date, none of the proposed solutions appear to have been discussed with any level of adequacy. The dam and reservoir may indeed be a solution, but it first needs to be thrashed out with stakeholders in both Nepal and Bihar, starting with a dispassionate look at the body of scientific, sociological, economic and political arguments both for and against.