Time To Talk

Gap in communication between India and neighbouring Nepal is an endemic problem that worsens Bihar floods

- Akshit Sangomla

Over 100 lives lost, 0.1 million displaced and 7.2 million people affected. That’s the human cost of the flood that deluged Bihar for close to two weeks this July. Many lives could have been saved, losses averted, and people and livestock evacuated had the communities known beforehand that heavy rains were also lashing the Terai (lowland) region of the neighboring Himalayan country, Nepal, and that the rivers flowing from across the border were in spate. But weather-related information takes an average 48 hours to travel through the Indian and Nepalese bureaucratic circuit, say, experts. And that’s way too long for a gushing river that can obliterate villages overnight.

Between July 7 and 13, heavy rainfall in Bihar caused flash floods in six districts (see “Knockout spell”, p41). People started picking up their lives as the intensity of rainfall reduced by July 14. But suddenly, the authorities of Koshi Barrage, located on the Kosi river just before it enters India, opened the floodgates. Though heavy rains in the state stopped by July 17, some 12 districts were declared flood-hit.

The delay of information sharing is alarming because every time Nepal has received heavy rains, Bihar has recorded flash floods. “In the recent past, this happened in 2008, 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017,” says Narayan Gyawali of Lutheran World Relief (LWR) foundation, a non-profit that runs a community-based project in India and Nepal on early flood warning systems. The two countries have a circuitous communication channel that means the information is either critically delayed or unclear and of little use to most riverbank communities in downstream Bihar. This is when the Nepal government has a dedicated Water and Energy Commission Secretariat for transboundary water issues, established way back in 1981. Both the countries have also constituted a Joint Committee on Inundation and Flood Management.