EVERY year without fail, the rivers in the Northeast rise in spate and devastate large populated areas in the flood plains, carrying away people and livestock. Last year, not less than 12 million people (close to half of the population of Assam and just under one-third of the entire region) were displaced or otherwise affected by high water, four times the ‘normal’ figure, suffering immense loss of property, crop and livestock, often a major source of livelihood and income. We came across cases where as much as 10-15% of cattle head had perished. Not less than 336 embankments had collapsed. All 27 districts were hit by the floods, including the hill districts where landslides and rushing water snapped communications and disrupted life. The flood damage was estimated at some Rs 6,500 crore.
The rivers of Northeast India leap and bound over hills; they do not flow. There are not less than 33 major rivers which in turn flow into that greatest of all Indian rivers, the Brahmaputra; there are 22 which have already fallen upstream in Tibet and in Bangladesh three more join it, including the Ganga.
One is not reflecting on the power of these rivers, which is immense. Others see that power differently: mention the scale and fall from the Himalayan heights to a civil or electric engineer and his or her eyes will probably light up at the thought of dams and projects that will create a surge of energy. One is not talking about that either.
When we talk about rights, how many of us think of the not less than three-to-five million people in the Assam Valley every year, and smaller but equally significant groups in the hill and plain areas of other states, who are displaced and hit by high water? What of their rights? Who speaks of their indignity except a few stray media reports?
Who realizes that in the cacophony about dialogue and development and Look East policies, we seem to have forgotten the persistent and critical challenge before us: how do we enable a minimum of 3-5 million an opportunity to cope with floods. Because unless we do that none of our policies or talk is going to work.
I am always stunned at the lackadaisical way we approach this problem, showing concern only when urban conglomerates like Guwahati are affected by ingress of high water. I think places like Guwahati deserve to be flooded because its residents, contractors and politicians as well as bureaucrats, have destroyed the land below their feet – they have emptied out wetlands and built high rises. When the next earthquake hits, don’t be surprised by high casualties and no amount of disaster preparedness or firefighting exercises will help.
Our basic foundations are eroded and corrupt: how can we build anything on them. So, the more floods happen in places like Guwahati the better. It should bring people to their senses of how, in the year of the Kaziranga centenary celebrations, when we rightfully take pride in what is touted as one of the world’s best conservation stories of rhinos growing in population from a handful to 1600, we are wilfully going about destroying the wetlands which act as storm cushions around the region’s largest city.
Deepor Beel, 40 sq km and a Ramsar site, one of only two in Northeast India, and one of the sights as you drive from Guwahati airport to the city, is encroached upon by agencies of every sort – the Centre (BSF camp and railways), nursing homes, brick kilns – and is swamped by water hyacinth. Apart from a storm cushion, it is a major migratory centre and breeding ground for birds. Those are being disrupted. This apart from the fact that we seem determined to shoot ourselves in the foot by short-term ‘development’ that damages us.
Who is even talking about Dibrugarh upstream? I spend some time there almost every month. It is the second largest city of the state and consequently of the NER, with a population of about 1.5 million. During the 1950 earthquake, which measured 8.7 on the Richter scale (the recent Tsunami was 9.0), Dibrugarh was destroyed. Subsequently a dyke was built there with spurs to protect it from floods. Because of the huge sedimentation load of the Brahmaputra, at flood time the river is literally lapping at the top of the embankment. The fact is that for a large part of the year, the river flows at a level higher than the city.
Already in February this year, the water was seeping under the embankment and into the paddy fields and homesteads across the area. This is Assam’s richest region – tea, oil, gas and, further on, coal. But is anyone talking about this problem and the possible consequences? Last year Dibrugarh was saved by hundreds of people from the city, led by young men who had once worked with Ulfa, who literally hurled themselves into an effort to close potential breaches in the embankments and spurs, working day and night. So far that story is unknown and unheard.
And that is the point: the floods delineate a political process as much as an environmental and economic one. It is the story of the strong and the weak, of the poor and the underprivileged on the one hand and lawmakers and policy-makers on the other, with business in between. In some cases civil society is stepping in to fill the breach. But is anyone talking about dialogue; a dialogue which includes debate and discussion on many issues, not just one or two that come to mind. One can only see enormous gaps of communication and comprehension. A dialogue to be true must involve all principal stakeholders – the people who are most affected by the strife and consequent problems, not just those who see themselves as stakeholders: government and its agencies as well as business.
The Northeast is devastated by floods every year. That’s a given. In some years there’s a worse flood than in others. Millions, as we know, are displaced. Last year nearly 350 embankments collapsed. That’s also a given. Yet to this day there is hardly any public debate in the Northeast or in the rest of the country about the efficacy of embankments and the need to find alternatives. Embankments today have become death traps: they trap the water, not mitigate flood. They, as any engineer will tell you, were meant to be palliative measures – short-term steps. Instead, they have become the only way that governments and their contractors think. Because there is so much money to be made from boulders, in the process scarring the hill face which are looted for their rock and timber. Little do we realise that in the Brahmaputra Valley it is not just floods which are the principal threat to development; it is erosion that is gnawing away at the lands and the resources of people, their lands, their homes, their hopes.
To give a simple statistic: India has some 15,675 km of embankments. Of this, 5,027 km are in Assam alone, that is 32 per cent of the country’s total. And the government still talks of more embankments. Clearly we are determined to replicate failure because there is so much money in it. The PM’s task force which was set up to look into the problem of flooding also talks of the normal engineering solution of more dams and embankments apart from a national water authority along the lines of the Tennessee Valley Corporation. But the difference is that the TVA, flawed as it is, identifies the public and environment groups and local governing institutions as among the first and most important stakeholders to engage with.
Talk about water in India and these are the last groups in the government’s mind. Water policy and water flows are classified information even though with GIS any decent researcher can get the information he or she wants without going on bended knees to the government. In our case, the task force was not even prepared to look at the issue of watershed management and problems upstream until one of the region’s most prominent geographers questioned and challenged its members.
Again, where is the dialogue? For true dialogue to take place one must have the other prerequisites in place – information and transparency, not rhetoric or ‘facts’ as paraded by one side or another.
So, unless the most marginalized of our people, those who are river-dependent among other groups, are represented at the dialogue table, conditions will not change except through growing pressure and violence. Come floods and overnight people lose homes and farms, livestock and life savings, forced to live without the basics of human dignity on embankments and roads for weeks and months without food security and a change of clothes. And people talk about freedom? Where is the freedom from indignity for the most vulnerable?
Let that be first addressed by those who claim to speak in our name. Let them participate in efforts to save our people and improve their economic conditions, instead of hectoring foreign countries and abusing those who disagree.
Who speaks for the displaced except politicians and governments in an ad hoc manner? Our policies at central and state levels are knee-jerk and the grassroots organizations working in this area are few and either do not have the spread or the depth and influence to challenge policy-makers.
Our own group, the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, although small, works in some 25 research sites and has a basic interactive rural group of not less than 2,000 persons ranging across seven districts of Assam. One demand that we have been pressing for some time is the urgency of building high-rise platforms where people can take shelter in times of flood, with a separate area for livestock. We must restore dignity and basic rights. Surely that is the essence of conversation, understanding and dialogue? If we are not bothered about how people live in conditions which defy the very basic definition of human rights – including safety, the right to clean water, food and shelter – then our policies and projects and programmes cannot go right.
We often hear praise about our diversity and inner strengths. Yes, they are there. We (the Northeast) are South Asia’s third landlocked region after Bhutan and Nepal. Indeed, that is so. Our land borders are 99 per cent with other nations and one per cent with the rest of India. The main connection is through the Chicken’s Neck or the Siliguri corridor. This sliver of land is our economic lifeline – gas, oil tea and other goods flow in pipelines and over roads and railways; commodities flow into the region through here.
Yet, when the floods erupt in North Bengal and the NER, road and rail links are snapped with unfailing regularity. These cause huge disturbances in the local economy because it is not just Assam which depends on these imports and exports: it affects all the states of the region where the rail and road routes go through Assam, from Moreh on the Manipur-Myanmar border, to Gelling on the Tibet-Arunachal frontier, to Parwa in Mizoram touching Myanmar and Agartala in Tripura on the Bangladesh border. Our manufacturing bandwidth, if we can call it that, is small: the enclave industries of bamboo and timber, oil, gas and tea.
These days there is a slight increase in that profile to cosmetic products and pan masalas and mosquito repellents. Our strengths of handicraft and handloom are still not high value although it is proposed that with the National Bamboo Mission some 20 million tons of bamboo can be harvested every year and lakhs can be employed in this field. But there seems to be a lack of urgency at the ground level: the gregarious flowering of bamboo is to begin soon and there is just a two-year period when it can be harvested.
But again as we think and look out of the box, we must recognize that the region still imports almost everything – from razor blades and fish to pencils and food grain, from cars to television sets. We are essentially a market and not a production centre. Our fruits, vegetables and even cattle are exported to Bangladesh and Myanmar and there isn’t a single major processing unit to tap this existing opportunity.
It is not that investors from Southeast Asia and other parts of the world will rush to help us; there is little or no altruism in business. Without a participative growth in entrepreneurship and business that at least helps local businesses to partner outside groups (domestic or foreign), we will not go too far.
I want to now turn to the Look East policy because it is related to what one has stated earlier, about the floods and water management issues.
The GOI’s Look East policy is extremely commendable and worthy of support. However, the policy and a lot of the thinking around it – connecting to Southeast Asia and our neighbours – overlooks one basic point. Without a water transport policy capable of moving large volumes of goods by river, the Look East policy will run into the sandbanks of the Brahmaputra. For it does not even consider the most basic of problems: when the region and its main road and rail corridor are under water or affected by water (either hit by it or recovering from it) for anything between five to eight months of the year, how can we have an economic policy that does not consider this very basic factor?
Railways and roads have their spokespersons and lobbies, but who speaks for inland water transport, the most neglected of our transportation systems. Yet, just look at the map of the region – can we not attribute the collapse of our economies and our fall from the fourth place in India’s income order to fourth from the bottom in the company of Bihar and Orissa to our comprehensive failure to fashion a people-participative response to floods and high water. And high dams are not the answer. Certainly not in a highly geologically unstable and seismic zone like the NER. Last year’s experience of what happened to the Manas river demonstrates what can happen even in a non-earthquake situation.
Yet the government is coming forward with a plan to build over 200 large dams in the region. Where is the dialogue here? Were the people of the region consulted? And if there is no process of consultation, then one can foresee a series of conflicts erupting over rights, threatened identities and spaces. 200 dams and 200 conflicts – is the GOI and the region prepared for such a disaster in addition to all the conflicts which exist anyway? Who is thinking in these terms at policy levels?
Massive interventions are being planned, proposed and implemented across the rivers of the Northeast. But has anyone studied the impact on aquatic life, on the endemic fish species of the region, on the dolphins, one of the most endangered fresh water mammals in South Asia, of which there are only some 200 left? We need to script another success story with the dolphin like that of the rhino – how can there be Bihu without the xixu?
Let me share one small experience where we are developing a physical intervention which could, we believe, make a difference to river dependent communities. I call this the boat of hope, because with limited funds and a team of boat builders, traditional builders, with new designs and a more powerful engine, we are building a boat that will take health services to people in time of need – especially during floods. Why hasn’t this been thought of earlier? Because there’s no money to be made, perhaps, if I am permitted to be cynical.
But there are reasons for hope: they lie in addressing issues head on. They lie in thinking innovatively and out of the box but with our feet on the ground and with commitment as well as by bringing in people-centric, people-consulting policies which can be implemented simply and with the involvement of those they seek to benefit.
