Adarniya Shri Dinesh Mishraji
It is another season of floods, perhaps worse this year as the newspaper
reports seem to suggest. Exactly as you have repeatedly said in your books, the
embankment led flood management theory has once more failed to provide any
succor.

If I have understood the problem correctly, the basic issues in flood management
in Bihar are:

Low Altitude of the Upper Gangetic Plains of Bihar which leads to very
low gradient for the rivers and shallow river beds.
Very high silt in the river water, particularly, during the monsoon
months.
These result in high deposition of silt in the bed raising the already
shallow river bed. Thus the embankments trying to tame the river fail to do
their job and just become a hindrance to the natural drainage of water. Vast
areas, deprived of the nourishing alluvial soil become fallow and vast tract of
land become perennially flooded as water is not able to find an egress. Thus the
embankments, far from being a boon, are proving to be a curse.
Now granted that embankments are not the solution, and if at all, end up
exacerbating the problem, but what is the solution other than just letting the
river do its job? Surely, engineering and technology cannot be so poor as to not
find a solution to this. Are not there similarly low lying areas elsewhere with
heavily silted rivers? How have they solved the problem there? We have heard of
Hwang Ho as the curse of China which is no longer in the news for its floods.
Have they managed to solve the problem there? Does that hold any lessons for us?
Or shall we have to think of a totally new and innovative solution?
Pardon my impertinence, but I have tried to look at the problem in a
different way and attempted a solution.
If we really look at the basics, then we have three objectives in the
following order of priority:

Protect the human habitations : provide for the safety of the human and
animal lives
Protect the transport infrastructure: roads and railways
Protect the crops
We add to this the premise that the geography of North Bihar makes it
impossible to tame the rivers through embankments and keep them within their
bed. It is not even desirable to tame the rivers as that deprives the land of
the alluvial top soil that gives it its productivity. In the worst case
scenario, let the floods take away one season of crops per year. We still have
two or even three safe crops with a higher yield due to the fertile alluvial top
soil. So we can remove the last objective from the equation altogether? We are
then left with the remaining two. Suddenly, the area to be flood protected
becomes just a fraction of the total area, as human habitation and transport
infrastructure put together cannot be more than 10% of the total land, howsoever
high the population density.
Should we then start putting bunds around human habitations – towns and
villages. These embankments would provide protection for the fifteen to twenty
days or even longer of flooding that we may expect in a year.
What would these protection embankments entail? How many towns and villages
to be thus protected? What would be the expenditure? Will this necessitate
relocation of some human habitation? Or can they still be protected if
sufficient passage is given to water to find its natural egress?
I remember the Patna protection bund was breached, allegedly by the Army
jawans in 1975 when Son started to flood Danapur. Would the people have still
breached the bund if there was another bund for Danapur, with sufficient passage
provided between the two bunds for the gushing water to merge into Ganga?
As regards roads and railways, modern civil engineering allows us to build
hundreds of kilometers of raised passage, high above the ground. Enough culverts
and drainage have to be built to ensure they don’t come in the way of passage of
water.
I am not sure if this model makes any sense or is just the oversimplified
ranting of a person who is not even a civil engineer. If indeed this makes any
sense, we can petition for an experiment for one river basin.

With warm regards


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