This year, the monsoon in Nepal lasted for almost a month and ended in September due. Nevertheless, he said goodbye with a prolonged four-day rain (jhari) over the Kosi River basin in western Nepal. When the curtain of the rainy season closed, it was time to breathe 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 an herbal crisis, but a crisis caused by man on a large scale. Tragedy will be the result of what’s happening. euphemistically called “river engineering” and what an angry activist calls “hydraulic despotism,” a remnant of the colonial era who continues to advise the water bureaucracy in South Asia. The structures he built on the Kosi and continues to be poorly are the worst 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.
Although the dam is part of the problem, there is too much attention due to the reinforcement structure: it is more than a kilometer long, 56 doors and a road. The main problem, however, are the dams that extend to more than 120 km on the shores above and below the dam in Nepal and Bihar. As a result of the landfill mania that continues to dominate South Asia, Kosi’s dams were not yet 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.
Even though the 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 who must obtain this title, because they have disadvantaged the land of slime and contributed to waterings, displacements and diseases.
Since 1959, when the embankments were completed, 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 meters and five 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 lifestyle 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 the depths of Tibet. The total domain 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 at the crossroads of tribeni before descending to a deep gorge, in front of the sacred site of Barahachhetra, before it flows into the plains beyond the village of Chatara.
Tamor, the eastern branch of the Kosi, descends from the flanks of the Kanchhenjunga massif, while the central root, Arun, goes directly 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 exchange for 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 entitled Kosi: A Review of the Genesis of Floods and Attempts to Solve This Problem, officials of the Central Water Commission of India, AK Jha and DP Mathuria, said: “Technical technique has proved to be too insufficient in their objectives. The embankments would be useless in controlling Kosi’s floods. It would be naive to embark on 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 population of the floodplain 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. Around 3 billion rupees (Indians) are spent each year on the structure and repair of Bihar embankments. Many of these paintings are faithful to the maintenance of 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.
The inclination of South Asian hydraulic engineers towards technological responses is well known; His Western gurus were the developers of dams and dams in Europe and North America; but the sedimentation in the rivers of the Himalayas is of another magnitude, that the engineering volumes do not process. In addition, policy makers were dazzled by the concept of “taming angry rivers” and overlooked historians and social scientists who would have told them about the ability of communities in periods of flooding. Furthermore, they have ignored the social injustice that occurs when technology answers go wrong, leading to the creation of “displaced”, marginalization and impoverishment on a large scale.
The last political replacement is to link the proposal of the Great Saptakosi Dam with the grandiose river liaison assignment so beloved by the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata party. It is an incredibly expensive formula designed to move water from surplus subcontinent spaces to the poor. 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 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, increasing the level of the riverbed. Thus, the largest triaierian of the Ganges, and the largest of the Himalayan mountains between brahmaputra and Indo, ended up where he is now, on 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 disasters.
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
Whenever there is a flood, during the small canopy window that Indian media allow in the backwaters of Bihar, central and state governments have accusatorily pointed the finger at Nepal for “letting go” the waters. Regardless of whether they know this very well, there are no reservoirs in Nepal to contain the 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 the public’s anger somewhat exceeds 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 problems.
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’s dikes have suffered damaging damage 8 times since its construction, but 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. the Kosi deposited millions of tons of sand in fields and villages.
The Kusaha leak occurred when Kosi’s flow was only 2,830 cubic meters consistent with the time (cumec), which is 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 in 60% of what is general at that time in August. The question in everyone’s brain deserves to be: what will happen to the millions of 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 it. Meanwhile, the height of the river bed would have been higher by more than a part of a meter in this period, which adds to the Kosi 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.