[ALOCHONA] An Environmental Mistake in India

An Environmental Mistake in India   Although the barrage, the longest in the world, was originally intended to divert water from the Ganges into the Hooghly River during the dry season and rescue the Kolkata port 257 km downstream, the government in Dhaka has accused India of using it to turn parts of Bangladesh into a desert, raising salinity, affecting navigation and adversely influencing the environment, agriculture and fisheries. If ever there was a lesson in the unintended effects of damming rivers, the Farakka Barrage is probably it. A 4.5-kilometer irrigation dam constructed on a tributary of the River Ganges in 1974, it is threatening to wreak havoc on a series of downstream villages and ultimately silt up the Kolkata harbor, the condition it was designed to fix. The barrage, a low-height dam, is now raising the possibility that two of the Ganges' major tributaries, the Padma and the Bhagirathi, will merge, with unimaginable consequences. Some 20 km downstream from the barrage, the two rivers are fewer than 750 meters apart. Ten years ago, they were almost 3 km from each other. The flow of water to the port of Kolkata, already faced with declining navigability, is expected to wane further. Although the barrage, the longest in the world, was originally intended to divert water from the Ganges into the Hooghly River during the dry season and rescue the Kolkata port 257 km downstream, the government in Dhaka has accused India of using it to turn parts of Bangladesh into a desert, raising salinity, affecting navigation and adversely influencing the environment, agriculture and fisheries. A large village, Akheriganj of Bhagabangola, has already disappeared from the map, with the destruction of 2,766 houses, leaving 23,394 villagers homeless as the rivers have changed their course. A school, a college, mosques and local governments have disappeared, with erosion gobbling up towns and villages. The changing river channel, which forms the border between India and Bangladesh, has resulted in tension as more than 10,000 hectares of land have shifted from the Bangladesh side to India. Critics say this is a product of the so-called "engineers' racket," a term coined by the Indian geographer Sunil K Munshi, to describe corruption resulting from greedy civil contractors working together with irresponsible state and federal governments. And it appears that now India will seek to undo the damage with a mammoth US120 billion plan to interlink its rivers, which originate in the Himalaya Mountains, with 30 interlinked canal systems that would deliver water to so-called Peninsular India. Mohd Khalequzzaman, associate professor, department of geology and physics at Lock Haven University in the United States, said in an email interview that "interference with the natural flow of the Padma has already led to anthropogenic and natural upsets in Bangladesh. On the contrary, the Calcutta (Kolkata) port didn't gain much in the way of increased flow that would have been enough to flush out the silt." Part of the problem, according to environmentalists, was that the siltation of the Kolkata Port came about because damming on the Damodar and Roopnayayan Rivers as a part of the Damodar Valley Corporation hydro project cost the rivers their ability to flush the Hooghly River. The Farraka Barrage, thus intended to correct that problem, ended up causing a bigger one. It was hardly unexpected. The first technologist to warn vainly against decision to build the barrage was the late Kapil Bhattacharya, then chief engineer for the West Bengal government, who said that the plan to deliver 40,000 cubic feet of water per second to flush the harbor was absurd, and that the designed capacity of the barrage would seldom rise above 27,000 cu.ft/sec. He also warned that the new distribution of silt loads after the construction of the barrage would result in huge floods in West Bengal and Bihar. His prediction came true almost immediately after the barrage began functioning. The New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment in a study - Floods, Floodplains and Environmental Myths – in 1999 criticized the embankment mode of managing floods, which, they charge, creates problems rather than of ameliorating them .Many Himalayan rivers are embanked all the way and as a result at many places the river beds are higher than the surrounding areas on the banks. Moderate rainfall causes inundation, as seen in West Bengal and Bihar. Rivers in the Himalayas, an erosion-prone mountainous region, carry a lot of silt. The question is whether to resort to flood management or learn how to live with floods based on 'oral traditions,' says Devashis Chatterjee, ex-senior deputy director-general, and known for his innovative ideas. "Human behaviour is teleological, and thus not governed proximally by straight physics. But that is first an illusion, because it is only a proximal illusion. Second, we must not pretend, especially to ourselves, that the laws of nature are known to any significant extent. And third, having said the first, who says homo sapiens is exogenous. We are part of the system, and we operate by the same rules".    http://asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1429&Itemid=34

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