Indian monsoon floods leave a million homeless

from the Guardian

One of northern India worst floods have left over a million homeless and destroyed 250,000 houses. Some are saying that the flooding was 'man-made". The flooding in India last year, led to an increase in child trafficking. - Kale

Randeep Ramesh in Delhi

More than a million people have been forced from their homes and 250,000 houses destroyed in one of the worst floods in northern India for decades, sparking accusations that the destruction was man-made.

Described by the country's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, as a "national calamity", the flooding occurred after the Kosi river burst its banks in Nepal ten days ago, sending floodwaters across a swath of the eastern flank of the Himalayas and submerging large parts of the Indian state of Bihar.

Today the Indian army mobilised, evacuating more than 100,000 people and dropping food supplies from the air. Pratyaya Amrit, Bihar's secretary for disaster management, said that a further 300,000 people would be moved to relief camps in the next 48 hours.

Experts have said that the flooding was not simply an act of nature, and that the failure of the Indian authorities played a large part in the making of the disaster. The Kosi river's flood defences are supposed to be able to handle flows of almost a million cubic feet of water per second. Yet they were breached when the flows were a little more than a tenth of that capacity, pointing to serious defects.

Nepal, where the Kosi originates from, has accused the Indian government of failing to uphold its commitment under a 1954 treaty to maintain the river's embankment. India countered that its engineers could not get access to river.

"We know the monsoon comes every year. Why weren't they ready for the disaster? The fact is that there was much less flow in the river than the stated capacity which exposes the kind of maintenance that was done," said Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the independent South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People.

Thakkar said that there was an "unfortunate lobby consisting of politicians, bureaucrats, builders and engineers who take money and don't do any work. There is no oversight of this process. That's why we get flooding every year."

Relief agencies said that Bihar's status as the poorest, most deprived state in India meant that victims of the annual monsoons were especially vulnerable.

Link to full article. May expire in future.