After the Deluge: villagers recover following Bangladesh's worst floods in a century

New Internationalist, Nov, 1998 by A. Hannan Ismail

VILLAGERS on Char Ishapasha heaved a sigh of relief when the flood waters started to recede this September. For two months, the inhabitants of this island had survived by living on rafts, while the deluge of the Brahmaputra River consumed everything in sight. Abdul Karim was one of the few who stayed to witness the spectacle. `Day after day we stayed inside using the raft for cooking and other purposes. The raft was also our only hope for survival if the house gave in to the current or the deposit level rose further.'

What Abdul Karim meant by `deposit level' is evident today. An entire village on the island, home to 28 families, has been buried under some three metres of silt. This is not surprising. At its height, the Brahmaputra is known to carry tidal waves of silt, under its surface, of nine metres in height.

Floods are a staple of life. The Bangla word for it is borsha. Villagers welcome borsha, as it carries fertile silt. Nothing, however, can compare to the flood that sub-merged over 60 per cent of the country during the months of July, August and early September this year. This was borna - The Deluge. For once, even the hyperbole of journalists struggled to comprehend the enormity of the disaster. Thousands of roads, highways and lanes have been swept away in 35 of the country's 64 districts. Private property, factories and warehouses have been wrecked by standing water; tubewell water has been contaminated; bridges and culverts are unsafe to cross. According to the United Nations, 21 million people have had their homes damaged or destroyed; they are without jobs, income and food. Bangladesh, together with its development partners and the country's coterie of non-governmental organizations, has launched a colossal relief and rehabilitation operation. According to Professor Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank, the only way to recover from the disaster is to `put the nation on a total war footing'.

This, the worst flood in a century, had many causes. Some 90 per cent of the water in Bangladesh originates upstream. The two main monsoon axes of the summer, one in northern India and the other in the far north-east of India, discharged unusually large volumes of rainfall for an unusually long time. Bangladesh, a country of 254 rivers, is often at the mercy of the three largest: the Ganges (or Padma, to use the local name), the Brahmaputra (Jamuna) and the Meghna. The convergence of these flows leads to a high susceptibility to flooding, especially given the country's flat topography. This year, due to the lengthy duration of monsoon rains, the convergence occurred on three occasions, one after another. By the first week of September, this was aggravated by a full moon, which stalled the discharge of flood water into the Bay of Bengal.

If this was not bad enough, a series of seismic events in the Bay of Bengal during August, which resulted in a slight shift of the sea bed, are being partly blamed for preventing flood water from flowing into the deep sea. This untimely news was a reminder that Bangladesh is a new land, in geological terms.

What comprises Bangladesh today has accreted rapidly over the past 6,000 years, building up layer upon layer of silt flowing down from the Himalayas. Bangladesh also sits on the cusp of two massive tectonic plates, the Indian and the Eurasian. As these grind into one another, they occasionally let off steam through tremors such as those that occurred in the Bay this summer.

A fractious and corrupt political culture, combined with an unresponsive and unwieldy administration, have hindered past efforts to deal with such calamities. The last great inundation, in 1988, was followed by ill-conceived attempts to instate a Flood Action Plan. The Plan was scuppered by a powerful NGO and environmental lobby because of its sheer lack of consultation with local people. The Flood Action Plan would have required forced resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people. Its non-participatory nature was ironically summed up when the Government of Bangladesh sat with its donors at a special session on `participation' in the ill-conceived Flood Action Plan in April 1994. The meeting took place behind closed doors in a five-star hotel in Dhaka. Construction work on embankments began even before environmental assessments were complete. Local people were observed breaking down the embankments of these and earlier constructions to allow flood water into their fields.

None of this will do much to help Abdul Karim and the millions of people in his predicament. But he should be warned. In the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s, disastrous floods occurred back to back. This may be a statistical illusion; then again it might not.

The story goes that the animals went in two by two. In Bangladesh, it's the floods that come in pairs. Bad as things are this year, there could be worse to come.

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