South Asia News
Monsoon floods affect 1.5 million people in India's Bihar state
Aug 25, 2008, 12:22 GMT
New Delhi - Floods and landslides triggered by heavy monsoon rains have affected nearly 1.5 million people in India's eastern state of Bihar, officials said Monday.
All major rivers are flowing above the danger mark in the state where 33 people have died in rain-related incidents including house collapses.
Electricity supplies, road and train services were disrupted as floods submerged several areas in the state.
'More than 1,480,000 people in over 1,000 villages in 13 districts including Muzaffarpur, Supaul, Katihar, Nalanda have been affected,' said an official in the National Disaster Management department.
He added that 57,411 people had been evacuated from low-lying areas and 27 relief camps had been opened to provide shelter.
Crops on thousands of hectares of land were damaged by the floods.
The rains eased since Sunday, but Bihar state authorities issued a health alert as teams of doctors and paramedics fanned out to the affected regions to prevent the outbreak of waterborne diseases.
More than 1,570 people died in the monsoon rains across India including the states of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Orissa, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, officials said.
India's monsoon season lasts from June to October but came a few weeks early this year. The rains are the heaviest in eastern India and gradually moved across in a north-westerly direction.
The seasonal rains in 2007 were the most devastating in recent memory, with more than 3,200 people killed across several states.
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David StrelneckAug 29th, 2008 - 03:28:36
In 2006 eight social entrepreneurs in India spent months investigating clues for solutions to the tragic devastation caused by Bihar floods. They identified through extensive field interviews that, beyond levees now triggering massively bigger deluges than smaller floods of past centuries, the causes of deep human disaster include local economics and politics which distort flood control and flood relief and often take deliberate advantage of the victims. The saddest conclusion, of course, is that for years the human devastation in Bihar has been predictable, almost reliable, months in advance of the floods each year, and not because of nature and rain, but because of economics and politics.
Their assessment reveals how flood relief is foreseen by many as a “third harvest,” with private sector and government middlemen buying, selling, and bribing rights to relief supplies months before the floods even arrive, bargaining away goods, property and even children to the sex trade in exchange for promises of flood relief or access to flood management funds. It is terrible, and it has implications for national and international media, businesses and bankers, relief agencies, citizens, and many others.
I am eager to share this draft assessment of clues for solutions, in hopes of helping anyone trying to understand and address the deepest roots of this problem. Please contact me at Ashoka, dstrelneck@Ashoka.org, for a copy of the draft notes from this work if they would be useful.
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