Author: Shishir Gupta
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: August 29, 2008
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/354690.html
Rs 1,000 cr aid package z Prime Minister calls
Bihar floods a national calamity, orders release of 1.25 lakh tonnes of foodgrain
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday
declared the Bihar floods a "national calamity" and announced immediate
assistance of Rs 1,000 crore for rescue and relief operations and 1.25 lakh
tonnes of foodgrains.
A day earlier, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish
Kumar, who heads a JD(U)-BJP coalition, showed Singh a 2004 satellite image
to make the point that his Government cannot be faulted for not taking steps
to prevent the flooding - the satellite image, official sources said, clearly
showed that the Kosi embankment had come under pressure four years ago at
the same place where it breached the barrier on August 18.
The western channel of the Kosi was blocked
and the eastern channel was under pressure.
In 2004, Bihar was under RJD rule. Sources
said that Nitish Kumar, by presenting the PM with factual data from 2004,
was making the point that the river embankment upkeep was either poor or did
not receive the attention it should have from the then RJD government.
He pointed out that the Kosi had been changing
course from 1979, shifting from east to west and now again back to west.
Sources said Nitish Kumar told the PM that
a day before the embankment breached 12.9 km upstream of the Kosi barrage
on the Nepalese side, he had urged External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee
to take up the matter with Kathmandu. Mukherjee got back to him saying that
Nepal was preparing for the swearing-in of Prachanda as Prime Minister and
there was no authority who could deliver immediately, the sources said.
Rejecting RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav's charge
of mismanaging the flood situation, Nitish Kumar told the PM that the maintenance
of the Kosi embankment was the job of the Ganga Flood Control Commission,
set up in 1972, under the Ministry of Water Resources at the Centre.
The chairman of GFCC is also the head of the
Kosi High Level Committee. Sources said that Nitish Kumar told Singh that
Bihar was only the implementing agency because the Kosi water was a subject
of the Indo-Nepal treaty.
There is worry that the Kosi will swell even
more by the first week of October. And with repair work possible only in October
at Kushaha in Nepal, the place where the breach occurred, the threat levels
will only rise. An estimated Rs 950 crore will be required to plug the breach
and repair the Kosi embankment.
