Sunita Narain: The drought-flood cycle

DOWN TO EARTH/ It may look natural, but it's actually government-made

In my column last fortnight ("The drought within", August 3), I wrote of an impending drought. This fortnight I wish to stand corrected.

Not drought, but devastating floods are drowning parts of the recently-parched country. So much so, that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who was till last fortnight seeking Rs 2,500 crore for drought-relief, has now asked the Centre for flood-relief, saying that his state should be treated the same as flood-devastated Bihar.

But is this cycle of floods and droughts as natural as it looks? In 1986, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had asked my colleague Anil Agarwal the same question.

He had scribbled a note to Agarwal asking him to explain how, "with environmental degradation, even low rainfall becomes a flash flood and the water rushes into the sea and then is not available as groundwater". As we explored answers, it became clear to us that the policy practice of "living with floods" was as challenging and urgent as was the practice of "living with droughts".

Let me explain. First, by the mid-1980s, it was clear that the annual flood-prone area "" defined as the area affected by overflowing rivers (not areas submerged because of heavy rains) "" had increased from 25 million hectares (mha) in 1960 to an estimated 58 mha. It was also clear that in all these years, there was no evidence that the rainfall had increased.

Therefore, to understand why floods are increasing, it is important to go back in time.

In the initial years of Independent India, our planners had agreed that "floods in the country can be contained and managed" and the First Five-Year Plan laid stress on building dams for controlling floods.

The devastating floods of 1954 led to thinking of a China-like movement syndrome, where the government wanted people to take on the task of building huge embankments to tame the mighty rivers.

But by the late-1950s, even as enthusiasm for this strategy faded, a monster had been set loose among India's rivers; a huge, powerful and entrenched embankment-industry had taken shape, hell-bent on making embankments. Embankments became the contractor-officials' dream projects project; even today, they make or break the fortunes of many a state politician.

But as floods continued, so did flood-control. This was done even as it was well understood that embankments had exacerbated the flood intensity of the region. These structures "" that bind the river "" do not allow the valuable and fertile silt to disperse during floods when a river naturally tends to go into spate.

The silt accumulates in the riverbed, raising the bed, leading to floods. The water has nowhere to go because all the natural drainage has been destroyed and this, in turn, intensifies the flood.

On the hand, the strategy of the past was the reverse of this: to find ways of dispersing the flood by channelising the excess water across the land "" to regenerate soil and groundwater reserves.

This system is best described by William Willcocks, a British irrigation expert, sent in the 1920s by the Raj to find solutions to the famine and malaria of Bengal. As he travelled and reconstructed ingenious engineering of people, Willocks found that floods were managed through an intricate system of inundation canals, where overflowing water from the swollen rivers would be channelised.

These channels would be used to harvest fish "" which, in turn, kept malaria at bay "" and would be used to irrigate the land at the sides as people cut the banks of the artificial streams to feed their lands.

In Bengal, these canals were known as kani nadi or dead or blind rivers. But just imagine his wonder, as Willocks explained that these canals were the only "seeing and living" irrigation works in the whole of Bengal.

Willcocks wrote to his colonial masters that his advice would be to rebuild the system of water management of the region that had been wilfully destroyed by them.

But unfortunately, neither the British, nor the whitewashed irrigation bureaucracy of India, heeded this advice. Instead, all the streams and wet lands that cushioned against the floods have been distributed in the name of land reform or simply destroyed.

And when you think about it, this cycle is no different from the regions where people had learnt to live, not with the excesses of water, but with its scarcity. Think of the principle of rainwater harvesting in a country that gets rain for only 100 of the 8,760 hours in a year. All the rain of the year could come in just one cloudburst. The solution is to capture that rain and to use it to recharge groundwater reserves.

Now let's return to Modi's Gujarat. Here is a state that is rain-deficient but suffers from devastating floods. Should we not be asking why this happens? Is it a natural disaster or man-made because the rain had nowhere to go? Without the tanks or ponds and all the other structures that impede its flow, catch it, or channelise its streams, rainwater can also devastate and destroy.

For this reason alone, Modi's claim that his state is no different from Bihar has to be condemned. This region has forgotten to cherish each drop of that water that turns into a flood. It is for this reason that I would argue that chief ministers like Modi should not be given flood-relief; instead, they should be penalised for the drought this flood will cause.