NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2008
World in View
India's floods show capital's inhumanity
The death toll in the current Indian flooding is estimated at 2,000 people, and literally millions more have been displaced. The first flood disaster occurred in northern Bihar last month, where an embankment on the Kosi River was breached to the extent that the river dug a new course, permanently wiping out many villages. As many as a thousand villages there have been inundated.
Now disastrous flooding has also spread to Uttar Pradesh in the north, and Orissa in the east. In Uttar Pradesh more than 50,000 people are in relief camps, with nearly three million people affected. In Orissa, more than 3.7 million people have been affected, with thousands of villages currently underwater. Up to 600,000 people remain marooned on rooftops or high ground at this moment.
As in Bihar last month, there is a shortage of rescue and relief efforts and there is anger. Conflicts are reported with authorities in Orissa. While some government spokesmen claim that there is nothing more they could have done, a closer look at the situation in Bihar tells a different story.
Bihar is one of India's poorest states, and many of the surviving villagers escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Over a third of Bihar's 90 million people already lived below the poverty line, with annual per capita income estimated at just $160. In the wake of the flood, these people were left in crowded refugee camps with shortages of food, clean drinking water, and medicine.
Residents accused the Indian government of failing to respond with proper urgency, sending too few rescue boats and helicopters, and too little food aid. There are reports of local government-connected gangs in Bihar taking possession of rescue boats and making off with relief materials. Corrupt politicians and bureaucrats have done the same in previous emergency situations.
Even more telling is what politicians and bureaucrats didn't do. The Kosi River embankment that was breached is near the border of India and Nepal. It had been built 50 years ago, following another round of deadly flooding in the area. It was meant to be a temporary embankment, expected to last 25 years and be succeeded by more permanent flood control measures. But the Indian central government took no further action, and neither apparently did local authorities in Bihar.
Nothing was done even though Bihar is one of the most densely populated areas of India, and studies had drawn attention to the ever-growing number of people at risk from floods there.
It is a scenario repeated again and again. The extent to which a society has become a human society can be measured by its planning for, and its response to, such "natural" disasters.
--G. E.
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