A Tale Of Two Bihars

The state is flood- and drought-hit at the same time, complicating response and relief.

- Amitabh Srivastava

Rahimbigha, nestled in the foothills of Khakhaunda Pahad in Bihar, is a picturesque and mostly peaceful village in the Nawada district of Bihar. Especially when compared to its Maoism-hit cou sin across the mountains, Koderma in Jharkhand. But every day, the women of this largely Dalit hamlet have to make a serpentine pilgrimage across its barren landscape. They are on their way to collect water from an abandoned stone quarry as the hand-pump the government installed in their village has run dry. This is because the water table has sunk dramatically after a poor monsoon. “Our women have to trek twice a day for water. It takes them an hour,” says Vijay Rajwar, a member of the village panchayat samiti.

And in a twist of irony, some 225 kilometres away, in Darbhanga district, the 300-odd inhabitants of Kusheshwar Asthan are forced to wade through waist-high water in the wake of a flood that is playing havoc with their homes and belongings.

Floods have affected as many as 2.35 million families this year, across 13 districts of the state, killing 133 people. Simultaneously, 24 districts in Bihar have been identified as droughthit. Four of these districts—Muzaffarpur, Darbhanga, Madhubani and Sitamarhi—have been declared both flood- and drought-hit. In fact, in November last year, Kusheshwar Asthan was among the blocks declared drought-affected by the state disaster management department.

“It is ironic, but not strange,” says a senior official in Darbhanga. “Different blocks of a district may have different problems at different times of the year. But, yes, our water resources engineers certainly need to manage the situation better than they have done so far.”