Kala Pani tales: For whom water is no synonym for life

April 7, 2009. Sitamarhi, Bihar

Septuagenarian Hasima Bibi continues to weep all the time. She has lost all her
family members, mostly due to incurable diseases for drinking chemically
polluted water in the village , derisively named Kaala Pani although land
acquisition records of Runnisaidpur block of Sitamarhi sadar region in Bihar has
its name as Raksia.

Her man of faith is Ramsevak Singh, secretary, Runnisaidpur local committee of
the Communist Party of India, the small party unit that fights for the
pollution-affected 800 households of the village. Ramsevak Singh’s plight is the
same.

As I walk along the path in front of her thatched house with Ramsevakji, she
informs, “ Kal dow litre mittika tel mila ( yesterday, got two litres of
Kerosene oil)”. Ramsevakji responds but has a grin against the administration. “
See how cruel and irresponsible is the present government. Not a single family
got the promised 35 kgs of wheat at Rs 2 per kg under Antyoday Yojana. She got
just two litres of Kerosene and feel happy. They have lost the power to say they
should get 35 kgs of wheat at concessional rates. No political party is around.
What we can do alone?”, he said with grit of communist of yesteryears with moral
values that have forsaken five-star communists of today.

That is the state of Kalapani village. Perceptually very different from Kaala
Pani of colonial era when armed freedom-fighters who were deported to the
Cellular Jail of Port Blair were ostracized for crossing Kaala Pani or sea, this
new Kaala Pani is amidst a watery strip in a 75 square kilometer area, submerged
due to the embankments on the Bagmati. The result is blockage of entry of the
Manusmara, a Bagmati tributary, into the village. And instead the entire water
body (Manusmara segment) comprises unprocessed effluents, released by a sugar
mill, belonging to the Dhanuka group of Kolkata.

Some 150 people – mostly children, oldies and women – died of Kala Pani ailment
and another 350 have been suffering from debilitating syndrome such as nausea,
loss of weight and appetite, fever and urinary troubles. Ramsevakji informs, “
The President of India bestowed the award of Nirmal Gram to the Mukhia, Archana
Singh, last year and the sugar mill-owners managed to get a clean chit from a
testing laboratory in Hyderabad . But you just dip any finger into the water,
you will feel the irritation and it will be blackened. Poverty was unknown here
a decade ago. Now it’s a regime of grim poverty”.

Indeed, the water here is black and stinking. No agricultural practice is
possible although it was a fertile area producing three to four crops ands
vegetables every year like wheat, Khesari, Arhar and Mesta .For the past ten
years ,self-reliant farmers of Kaala Pani have to work as bonded labour in
Punjab and Haryana to keep an wolf from the door of their households.

This apart, silted up river-beds and transport of silts due to reaction against
embankments causes mounds of silts At Raksia and adjacent Ibrahimpur of
Runnisaidpur block , a 27 feet high mosque in Raksia remains buried under with
about five-foot upper portion of two minars visible while a temple of Lord Shiva
is said to be dug out every year from the sand to help people offer puja.

There is hardly any reach of the embankment that has not faced the wrath of the
river and the breaches. Queerly enough, the Government and masses in general
consider such structures as hedge floods, even though every major flood has
blasted this myth. Silt-load of rivers devastates catchment areas by rising bed
level of the rivers.

A press communiqué issued by Barh Mukti Abhiyan – Freedom from Floods Campaign –
whose convenor is Dr Mishra, warned , “The setting is seemingly perfect for
another breach! The state has just woken up, collecting stones for the
protection work in case the river decides to gnaw the embankment. Should that
happen, what course the river would adopt before it joins that Ganga is not
known just as it was not known the course last year following the breach at
Kusaha?”

A few local Nepali inhabitants took members of the visiting team – this
correspondent having been included – around and showed the position of
increasing proximity of the rivers, boulders and wire-nets. “ Had it not
breached at Kusaha, it would have taken place here at Prakashpur”, the oldest of
them told the team.

The main reason for loss of farmland in other districts of north Bihar like
Sitamarhi is embankment-accelerated floods, the deluge-like situation last year
following the breach along 1770 metres of eastern embankment of Kosi at Kusaha
in Nepal on 18 August last year. The course of the mighty Himalayan river
remained changed for nearly five months. But the “civil engineers’ racket” which
is necessarily hyphenated from numerous competent, talented and
dedicated-to-rule book other civil engineers will never give up the highly
detrimental policy of embankment-construction. A 15-member team of social
activists, technologists, ex-bureaucrats journalists , after visiting five
districts of flood-ravaged areas of Bihar and eastern Nepal including the Kusava
dyke-burst spot in the last week of March , expressed apprehension about another
breach at Prakashpur on the eastern bank in village Rajabaas in Sunsari district
of Nepal, 14 km upstream of Kusaha. Kosi is close to the embankment site and
with the spurs and the possibility of another breach anytime, following a heavy
shower cannot be ruled out. The team leader and one of the handful of most
knowledgeable flood management experts, Dinesh Kumar Mishra fears, “if it
happens, large portions of Purnea, Katihar and Darbhanga may go under water.”

Engineers and interested politicians have no interest in understanding the
secular hydro-dynamics of rivers but even political parties that vouch for
democracy for social uplift, particularly the communists, including Naxalites
and Maoists, too seem apathetic towards flood-afflicted thousands. Some 3.3
million people remain are still to recover from deluge-shocks in a state that
gave to the nation stalwarts like Swami Sahajanand, Jayaprakash Narayan,
Rajendra Prasad, Babu Jagajivan Ram and Karyanand Sharma.


Sankar Roy, Kolkata


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