We have been living with floods for ages and centuries. But then the British came and they said these natives should be taught how to live. T
hese rivers must be dammed and
controlled. The easiest way was to build a wall between the river and
the people. Then again experts came and told us that we did not know
how to live with it and that they wanted to teach us disaster
management. It is an insult to our forefathers who had devised their
own methods to face the floods.
The so called experts did not take into account the fact that floodwaters contain sediment and when they prevent water from spilling out they unwittingly hold back sediments on the walls that they have created and the riverbed rises. The water that was coming freely into the river is now stranded outside and this causes water logging. You construct a sluice gate, which you cannot operate during the rainy season because if you do, the water from the main river might go into the countryside. So you have to keep it closed. And when you keep it closed, the water is going to rise anyway, and the embankments are likely to breach, something which has been happening quite often these days. The British had calculated cost-benefit of rehabilitation and repairs of these embankments based on a life of ten years. But these were washed out much before that.
In 1947 India got its independence. For five to six years that legacy continued. In 1953 there was a terrible flood in Koshi in Bihar. The then Prime Minister came and said 'My god something must be done immediately to save these people'. Immediately we cannot do anything but create the same walls, which the British had abandoned. This one statement gave the project political legitimacy and our engineers took a180 degrees turn. They explained this by saying that if the same amount of water is allowed to pass through a narrower area the velocity of water will increase. It will eat away the sides and dredge the bottom – the river will get de-sectioned and more water will pass and hence the floods will be tamed as more and more water is passing. This gave the project technical legitimacy. They brought yellow engineers from China, white engineers from the United States to say the same thing.
The result of this policy is that in our state we now have 2440 kilometres of embankment. The flood prone area has gone two and half times. It was only 25 lakh hectares in 1922. It is now 69 lakh hectares.
Nobody wants to evaluate the flood control programme. It seems to have done more harm than good. About 2000 crores rupees have been spent. Where have they gone? Somebody should have been made responsible for it.
But responsibility and accountability are words which are not there in our national water policy. The reports on World Commission on Dams and our National Water Policy, both say the same thing. The only difference is that in the World Commission's report the word accountability is mentioned at least a hundred times, whereas it is not mentioned even once in our water policy.
An engineer called Peter Albert, who worked in Assam, once said that the expertise of the engineers and the resources of the government have played havoc with mankind many times and it is about time that we should take stock of the situation and prevent such things from happening. My proposal for a Compensation Code is an attempt to fix responsibility and accountability.
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