This year, the monsoon in Nepal lasted for almost a month and ended at the end of September. However, it was fired with a four-day rain (jhari) in the Kosi River basin in western Nepal. closed the rainy season, it was time to give a sigh of relief again because Kosi’s embankment had not broken. The lives and livelihoods of millions of others have been saved on a strip of the Nepalese plains and downstream of Bihar.
Given the government’s inertia in Patna, Delhi and Kathmandu, a calamity in Kosi’s components is inevitable. When he strikes, it will not be a grass crisis but a crisis caused by man on a large scale. Tragedy will be the result of what is euphemistically called “river engineering” and what an angry activist calls “hydraulic despotism,” a remnant of the colonial era that continues to advise the water bureaucracy in South Asia. examples of technological arrogance in this component of the world.
The foundations of the inevitable tragedy were laid about 70 years ago, when the wonderful flood of northern Bihar in August 1953 led india’s newly independent leaders to imprison Kosi’s. Jawaharlal Nehru ordered that the river be covered by more than a hundred km of dams that descend from Nepal and cross Bihar.
When they learned that walls built on the banks of rivers to prevent flooding would deprive agricultural land of water, planners retroactively built the Kosi Dam, only Nepal’s internal Bhardaha, to divert water into the east and west canals.
While the dam is part of the problem, there is too much attention to the reinforcement structure: it is more than a kilometer long, with 56 valves and a road; however, the biggest problem is considerations that descend more than 120 km to the two banks above and below the dam in Nepal and Bihar. As a result of the terraplen mania that continues to dominate South Asia, the Kosi were bad structures to build.
Things have stagnated for decades, even though the explanation of why and duty require overcoming political inertia and seizing scientific and scientific opportunities for Kosi embankments. The lowest denominator technique, not unusual in terms of opportunities, has been to propose a higher dam and an upstream reservoir in Nepal, but that is not the solution, as we will see.
Although Kosi is the source of the invigorating slime deposited for millennia that makes the region so fertile and densely populated, the river is called the “Bihar pain. “In fact, it is the embankments that will have to obtain this title, having disadvantaged the land of slime and contributed to congestion, displacement and disease.
Since 1959, when the embankments were finished, silt and sediments have had to settle in the straitjacket rather than spread through Kosi’s “inner delta” in east Bihar. This means that more than five centimeters are added a year from the riverbed. As a result, we now have a scenario in which the ganges’ largest tributary flows on an augmented platform over the peripheral floodplain. Essentially, the Kosi flows on a plateau that is between 4 and 5 meters above the outside area. It’s an unbalanced river.
Standing on the embankment, you can gently see the amazing elevation differential, internal and external. It only takes a little eye to think about what will happen when the river crosses it and unleashes with all its might on the floodplain the peak of the flood. When the embankment breaks as the Kosi floods one of those next monsoons, the magnitude of devastation in lost lives will surely exceed tens of thousands.
As silt accumulates every year, relentlessly, it is transparent that anything is to be done, but the politics of populism and non-responsibility are so intense that the Indian government is barely willing to plan for people. “complete” the embankments and deceive the public about the lifestyles of a plan – in the form of saptakosi’s upper dam.
The Kosi, or Saptakosi, is the largest tributary of the Ganges. Its mountain basin encompasses most of eastern Nepal, from the Kathmandu Valley to Sikkim, reaching Tibet. The total dominance of the river basin is 84,740 km2, of which 22% in Tibet. , 40% in Nepal and 38% in the plains of Bihar. The 3 rods – Tamor, Arun and Sunko – are located at the crossroads of tribeni before descending to a deep gorge, in front of the sacred site of Barahachhetra, before flowing into the plains beyond the village of Chatara.
Tamor, the eastern branch of the Kosi, descends from the flanks of the Kanchhenjunga massif. The central stem, Arun, goes straight north to drain much of the Tibetan plateau northeast of Mount Everest. Sunkosi, who comes from the east, gathers five tributaries, to the edge of the Kathmandu Valley.
In total, seven tributaries make up the Saptakosi.
The Himalayas are a young and fragile geological formation that increases a few centimeters a year due to plate tectonics, and Kosi cuts the rocky bed, offering a large load of dirt and sand on the plains. The river pours 120 million cubic meters of sediments a year, one of the heaviest rivers on the planet. Since 1957, the Kosi has deposited 450 million cubic meters of sediment on the Kosi dam in Nepal, and more than one billion cubic meters downstream in Bihar among the embankments.
It is the silt of the Kosi and other tributaries that created the Ganges maidaan, the fertile powder that makes it cornea for dense dwellings. When the Kosi emerges from the gorge, it deposits thicker pebbles and sand in the upper courtyards, while the finest slime contains biological sediments. matter reconstructs the fields of northeast Bihar.
Communities on the floodplain have enjoyed annual flooding, adapting to surface waters for a few weeks with each monsoon. The scenario would become complicated with extended upper floods, such as when Brahmaputra and Ganges peaked simultaneously, as did Mahanadi and Teesta. However, the floods would disappear as temporarily as they arrived, leaving the floor revitalized. People lived in an exchange with the Kosi.
In recent decades, embankments have not only kept water and sediments enclosed, but have also delivered the best slime in the Ganges rather than in the Bihar fields. The other tragic and accidental result of this was, in fact, the accumulation of flooding due to drainage. And no one spares an idea for the million Indian citizens who remain in the idea of proper collateral damage in the wonderful technological advancement.
Although 3,500 km of dams were built in Bihar for flood protection, flood-prone dominance quadrupled to 6. 8 million hectares. Although the original plan to protect 214,000 ha from annual flooding was lost to around 426,000 ha due to congestion due only to Kosi’s dams. to the South Asian Network on Dams, Rivers and People, “The real crisis in northeast Bihar is not flooding but drainage. “
In a 2006 article titled Kosi: A Review of the Genesis of Floods and Attempts to Solve This Problem, officials from the Central Water Commission of India, AK Jha and DP Mathuria, said that embankments would be useless in controlling the floods. Kosi floods. the discovery of this risk through structural measures ”.
The attempt to “domesticte the Kosi” is nothing more than playing dangerously with nature and climbing into human misery.
Ironically, the victimization of the floodplain population was not done through colonial management, but through the representative formula of governance without delay after independence. Politicians and remote engineers what was smart for the masses, ignoring issues of culture, geology, river history and morphology. In one fell swoop, they got rid of Kosi’s ability to rebuild the ground and created a sedimentation time bomb.
Seeking to respond to bihar’s floods with something exciting and overwhelming, India’s new leaders focused on the need for a superior dam to contain the waters of Kosi, built on Barahachhetra in the Nepalese mountains to create a garage tank. the Kosi, which was possible without delay. Nehru to go.
Since the 1950s, much of Bihar’s political economy has been explained and controlled by outsourcing cash to armored embankments. Aimed at the “Terraplen Mafia,” a network of technocrats, politicians and traders conspires to ensure that election measures are not serious. unless it is the proposed upper dam, while continuing the annual fortification mask of the embankment.
Those in force are willing to live with the transparency and danger of Kosi embankments, to bleed out the Treasury as a constant source of annual loot. Every year approximately 3 billion rupees (Indians) are spent on the structure and repair of Bihar’s embankments Much of this will fix paintings in the Kosi. It is said that up to 60% of the cash charged to the embankments is used to align the wallet up and down in Bihari’s political-bureaucratic hierarchy.
South Asian hydraulic engineers’ inclination towards technological responses is well known; their Western gurus were the developers of dams and dams in Europe and North America; but sedimentation in Himalayan rivers is of a different magnitude, which engineering volumes do not process. In addition, policymakers were dazzled by the concept of “domesticating angry rivers” and overlooked historians and social scientists who would have told them about the ability of communities in flooding periods. Moreover, they have ignored the social injustice that occurs when technology responds go wrong, leading to the creation of large-scale “evicted,” marginalization, and impoverishment.
The new political substitution is to link the proposal of the Great Saptakosi Dam with the grandiose river liaison assignment so popular with the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata party. It is an incredibly expensive formula designed to move water from the surplus spaces of the subcontinent to the poor in water. Spaces.
In their published plans, Indian river link technocrats take Nepal’s territory for granted, as if they were there to give it, and foresees the inevitable rejection of the declining river regions of the Ganges and Brahmaputra. Kosi Dam, the allocation of the river link is a far-fetched concept of incompetent technocrats having fun with distressed politicians with inflated egos.
During geology and antiquity, through a procedure known as avulsion, the Kosi has filled its existing channel with sediments, replaced and replaced course. For more than two centuries until it was wrapped in the last 1950s, this dynamic river moved its canals and moved 120 km west over the inland delta (or fan), away from Purnia and towards Saharsa. Had it not been retained, given the slope of the terrain, the river would have gradually moved eastwards through its paleochannels.
Human intervention locked up the Kosi, but the river continued to bring land, sand and pebbles, adding to the riverbed. Thus, the largest triaierian of the Ganges, and the largest of the Himalayan mountains between the Brahmaputra and the Indo, ended up where he is now, in his “raised” bed. A rupture of the embankment on either side due to poor maintenance, typhoon flooding, glacial lake or even sabotage can simply be a disaster.
When the gap occurs, we don’t even dare wait for the number of lives that would be lost, farm animals would drown and farmland would disappear. A demographic, economic and political crisis would continue: impoverishment, emigration, child trafficking and exploitation of all. In this scenario, the political regime of Patna and New Delhi is paralyzed: it is much less difficult to distribute the generosity of the embankment and spend a year and then
Every time there is a flood, during the small canopy window that Indian media allow for Bihar’s backwaters, central and state governments have accusatorily singled out Nepal for “letting go” the waters. There are no reservoirs in Nepal to contain floodwaters for release. The two dams (in Gandak and Kosi, not intended to contain water) are close to the border and controlled by the Indian authorities.
If public anger somewhat overcomes the monsoon, the Indian government has another prepared response: flooding will end as soon as Nepal allows the structure of the saptakosi upper dam. For decades, India’s water bureaucracy, concentrated in Patna, has done little else. to repeat this mantra of the upper dam, regardless of the morphology of the river, not to mention sociological, geopolitical and safety issues.
When devastating success occurs, amid the resulting tragedy and public anger, the Saptakosi High Dam will suddenly become the time table at a point supported by indian state strength. We will achieve such a popular appeasement point, that it will be for the militants of the floodplains of Bihar or the Nepalese government to turn back.
Kosi embankments have suffered damaging damage 8 times since their construction, however, obviously, the lives and livelihoods of the dehat population are sufficiently valued and Bihar’s government has fled without being held accountable. Apparently exasperated, Kosi Mata sent a strong message with the east gap of the embankment of August 18, 2008, 12 km north of the dam. Even as the town of the nearby village of Kusaha looked dismayed, the upper state on the eastern embankment, the river crossed the earth’s movements and sprouted like a waterfall.
“At first, there was a kind of fog emerging from the tumultuous waters,” a witness recalls. Within minutes, the tumultuous waters had dug a mile from the east dam and before you knew it, almost all of the Kosi veered through this cut, running southeast into Bihar’s “flood-protected” domain. There was no consultation that the river would return to its “designated canal” because the embankment was on its way, and on any occasion the water would have to climb a ledge to succeed on the bed of the Kosi River.
“It’s as if a sea has suddenly appeared, extending as far as the eye can see south and east, beyond Nepal to India,” the witness said. The Kusaha gap killed 70 other people in Nepal and more than 250 in India. Bihar districts were submerged, displacing nearly 3 million more people in Supaul, Araria, Purnia, Madhepura and Saharsa. A total of 340,000 hectares of state crops were destroyed and countless cattle were withdrawn. After trapping one of their old desert canals, the Kosi deposited millions of tons of sand in fields and villages.
Kusaha’s leak occurred when Kosi’s flow rate was only 2,830 cubic meters consistent with the time (cumec), only one-tenth of the 28,300 m3 for which the embankments were designed. In addition, the Kosi did not even flood at the time, its flow rate was 60%. of what is general at the time in August. The question in everyone’s brain deserves to be: what will happen to the millions of other people in northeast Bihar in the event of a sudden rupture of a primary flood?
It’s been a dozen years since the Kosi sent his warning, and in the meantime, planners haven’t done anything yet to stack sandbags in the dams. Meanwhile, the height of the river bed is said to be higher in more than one part in this period, increasing Kosi’s imbalance.
Kanak Mani Dixit is a journalist and founding editor of Himal Southasian magazine.
This is the first of three parts on the imbalance of the Kosi River.