Panos South Asia supports a media study tour of the Kosi flood plains in North Bihar

Panos South Asia supported a media tour of Bihar’s Kosi river basin to study and write about the politics of flood control. The tour was conceptualized by Barh Mukti Abhiyan, a loose coalition of groups in Bihar trying to create awareness about the science and politics of flood management as well as lobbying with the governments to rethink their strategy on floods. Here is a report.
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Barh Mukti Abhiyan (Freedom from Floods Campaign) BMA is a congregation of concerned citizens working over the issue of floods in the state of Bihar, one of the most flood-prone and most embanked state of the country. BMA does not relate floods with disasters and treats it as a way of life. If that were not so, the population density that is observed in the flood prone states of the country should have been observed in the drought prone states. Easy availability of water round the year and fertile land must have attracted the early settlers to the flood prone areas. Hardship of about ten days in the rainy season and good harvest round the year must be the reason for sticking to the ground despite seasonal odds. Floods have been converted to disasters because of faulty policies of the state to tame the rivers which has been done mostly by embanking the heavily silt laden rivers that descend down the Himalayas into the plains.
Jacketing of rivers leads rise of the river bed, water logging in the so called protected countryside of the rivers, sluice gates constructed to regulate the floods often get choked and the breaches in the embankment aggravate the problems of the people living in the protected areas. Once fallen into the trap of the embankments, it becomes difficult to come out and one is left with no choice than to raise the embankments higher and higher and thus creating more problems for the coming generations. The irony of the process is that when India resorted to construct embankments along its rivers in 1953, it had before it the examples of malfunctioning of the embankments on the Mississippi in the USA and the Hwang Ho (Yellow River) in China and yet the vested interests took over the stage with embanking of the Kosi, the most vibrant and lively river of north Bihar. The breach in the embankment of the Kosi River at Kusaha in 2008 was just an example that the BMA has been cautioning the state for the past two decades since it had the full knowledge of seven earlier breaches in the same set of embankments. There was a century old debate not to embank the Kosi during the British rule which was revered in 1953 and once the Kosi was embanked, almost all the major rivers of Bihar were embanked without any debate or any preparation. The result is that the flood prone area of the state that was limited to only 25 lakh hectares in 1952 has now risen to 68.8 lakh hectares in 1994, the year of last assessment of the flood prone area in Bihar.
BMA is campaigning against this fallacy and feels that somebody in the government must be worried about the fact that the investment in flood control sector is doing more harm than good and this must be affecting livelihood of the agrarian society that is what Bihar is. The state has a flood-prone area of about 70.6 per cent of the areas of the state and about 16 per cent area of the state is permanently waterlogged. Rise in the flooded and the water logged area of the state is pushing more and more people to look for employment in other states, claims of attracting labor to parent state under NREGA not withstanding.
BMA is trying to learn from the people their traditional way of living with floods and popularize the same at different places and fora. It is also trying tom learn more and more about the official policies of the state vis a vis rivers and floods and tell the same to the people in the flood affected areas about its implications. It makes use of every possible opportunity to take up the issue with the government and suggest them the corrective measures. Unfortunately, those who matter and can do something to alleviate the sufferings of the people are immune to criticism and indifferent to any suggestion, howsoever, it may be. This is where we found the role of media to help us to mobilize the public opinion and put some pressure on the administration.
BMA has been helping visitors, researchers, academicians, and activists go around the flooded and water logged areas, talk to the people there, take their suggestions and write about their experiences in the press. We have helped some documentary makers visit the area and they have done a good job in helping our cause. Some of the films have been applauded in India and abroad.
For the past few years along with accompanying the visitors who often come with their own agenda, we thought of inviting media persons to visit the area that we want them to visit, see things through our eyes and then write about the situation here. This has yielded good results because, otherwise, floods are reported as disasters year after year without going into the game that goes on in the name of controlling floods which, of late, has been renamed as flood management but without any change in the field approach.
In 2009, we reviewed the effort and found that this all has been a male dominated effort and even we at BMA had not helped anyone to see the problem from women’s perspective. The rivers that we were dealing with were all females and often termed as mothers. The point to ponder was whether a mother could be that cruel to her children. Let us ask the women. The idea clicked, and we thought of taking an all women team to the flooded area and make them interact with the people, both men and women, here and then let us know about their inferences. We were apprehensive to start with because women journalists may not like the idea visiting Bihar with strangers but we were helped by our friends outside Bihar to talk about our credibility. We failed to make it an all-women trip but seven of them responded and came to Bihar in the month of March 2010 (9th to 13th). They included media persons from Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, and Bangalore. There were in all 14 reporters.
Our impression with women members of the team is (1) Presence of one single woman in the team ensures discipline – no loose talking, no chewing paan, no drinks, and sticking to time schedule. (2) They have been very responsive in writing. Ms.Poonam Pandey wrote in Nav Bharat Times of Delhi immediately after going back from Patna and the others followed it closely. Ms. Bula Devi has written multiple articles on Bihar situation covering floods and water pollution. Ms. Deepika Aravind has written in Nepali papers, which is so very important to us. Ms. Meena Menon wrote in The Hindu that attracted lot of attention and queries from us. Ms. Reshama Jathar wrote in Marathi papers and Ms. Surekha Sule not only wrote about Bihar, its floods and the problems that the people are facing here; her article in Indiatogether was virtually a tour diary. She went a step ahead and made contacts with Central Water Power Research Station at Pune to initiate a dialogue with the engineers there with us.
Hats off to each one of them for all the initiative that they have taken and the best thing that has happened is that they have kept up with us, something that had not happened in past.
The response of other colleagues who visited the Kosi basin has been commendable, especially of the two members of Down To Earth magazine who have written articles about the Kosi area and are in regular touch ever since and have made visits to other spots suggested by us.

Here are some links to the articles that have appeared following the tour
http://navbharattimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/5687198.cms
http://www.hindu.com/2010/03/19/stories/2010031954251100.htm
http://www.indiatogether.org/2010/apr/env-kosibank.htm
http://www.ekantipur.com/2010/04/03/oped/lives-on-the-koshis-sands/311632/
http://loksatta.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=82583:2010-07-02-04-33-28&catid=194:2009-08-14-02-31-30&Itemid=194