P Jayaram compares this year's Bihar devastation with last year's floods.

In Delhi

SOME call it India’s Katrina - that hurricane that struck the US Gulf coast three years ago and caused unprecedented devastation.

Like Katrina, which battered and breached the levees protecting the New Orleans, the floods in eastern Bihar state, said to be the worst in India, were also caused by the swollen Kosi river breaching the mud embankments upstream in Nepal.

After bursting through the embankment on August 18, the flood waters hurtled down to the plains of Bihar. The volume and force of the waters were such that the river changed its course and cut across the state, submerging some 800 towns and villages not normally prone to floods.

Dozens of villages are said to have been wiped out and, according to official count, 125 people have died - though unofficial estimates are much higher.

The floods are an annual phenomenon in Bihar and I could relate to the situation because I was there covering the floods during this time last year, though the enormity of the disaster this time is much bigger.

I was in Samastipur, about 100 km north of the state capital Patna when the Buri Gandak and Bagmati rivers had flooded a number of districts, taken a toll of 105 lives, affected 12 million people and destroyed or damaged 75,000 houses.

I had met people who had taken shelter on high grounds with their livestock to escape the flood waters and those who bitterly complained about the government’s indifference to their plight. Some demanded that the chief minister resign.

But while 12 million people had to deal with water-logged homes that time, this year 3 million have been made homeless altogether.

The floods have not been confined to Bihar alone.

In the north-eastern state of Assam, monsoon rains have caused the Brahmaputra River to burst its banks, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. 

More than 100 villages have been completely submerged, officials said. 

Across the border in Nepal, tens of thousands of people have also been displaced.

In Bangladesh, bordering Assam, over half a million people have fled their homes after several rivers crossed the danger mark and inundated villages and farmlands.

According to Bihar state officials, the flood waters had started receding in the last two days, but that could be the beginning of fresh problems for the affected people.

For one, tens of thousands of people, of the half million rescued from marooned villages, are cramped in unhygienic conditions in relief centres, where they co-exist with their goats, cows, buffaloes and chicken.

With some three million people affected by the floods, more are expected to join them.

The UN agency UNICEF warned that the summer heat, combined with scarcity of drinking water and poor hygiene posed a great risk of water and airborne epidemics breaking out.

UNICEF officials said an increase in cases of diarrohea and fever ad already been noticed among the relief camp inmates.

Officials say that with the Kosi changing its course, the people of many villages in the worst-hit Supaul, Araria and Madhepura districts may never be able to return to their homes, though efforts are being made to direct the river to its old course.

A bigger problem is that the Kosi, known as ‘Bihar’s Sorrow,’ could leave thousands of hectares of farm land barren.

The locals say unlike other rivers, which originates in the Himalayas and bring down fertile soil, the Kosi has covered the land with coarse sand and gravel.

“It will badly affect the food security of the state and will take a long time to repair,” Dr. M.A. Khan, a senior official of the Indian Council of Agriculture Research, told Hindustan Times newspaper.

He said the flooding by Kosi had submerged 110,000 ha of farmland, or about 1,100 square km.

The flood-hit people told television channels that more than three weeks after the waters submerged their villages, relief distribution was still tardy, with many complaining that no government officials or relief agency had visited them. 

Food riots have been witnessed in some places, when hungry men, women and children stormed government stores or attacked relief trucks and helped themselves to food.  

In many places, pregnant women had delivered in the relief camps with no medical assistance, while children and adults have been traumatised by the loss of everything they had. 

Read Indian villagers won't leave.