Is election patchwork enough to fix the ‘sorrow’ of Bihar?

As disquiet took over Kundah village on Kosi river's eastern bank one evening last week, Ram Jatan Sada loaded his household items into a tractor trolley.

- Chetan Chauhan

Kosi is known as 'sorrow of Bihar' for causing frequent floods.

An angry Kosi had taken a huge chunk of land a few feet away from his hut, next toa government run primary school, where he lived with his wife and three children for almost two decades.

Other villagers helped Sada, even as some cursed the government for not doing anything to prevent avulsion (river changing its course) due to heavy siltation.

As the monsoon rain ended and the river water level went down in first week of October, villagers say, the Kosi, laden with silt and debris, slowly started moving left, washing land and taking away 14 hutments.

“T never thought that Kosi Maiya (mother) would take my house again,” Sada rues.

Like nearly a million people living on the banks of river Kosi between the two 126 km-long embankments built by the Cen-tre with the help of Russian engineers in 1963, Sada was first displaced about two decades ago.

“T built my hut here thinking it would be safe when we lost our earlier home to the river,” says the daily wage labourer.

Still, curses apart, villagers admit that there has been a quicker response this time from Water Resources Department (WRD) to the avulsion. They say the reason is apparent—the forthcoming Bihar assembly elections taking place on November 6 and ll with the votes to be counted on November 14.

“Chunau ka samah hai (it is election time),” says Mohammed Islam, another villager, looking at WRD's sub-divisional officer (SDO) from Maisi block, who is supervising about 20 labourers placing sandbags to prevent the village's only school from collapsing.