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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Engineering a season of floods -Amitangshu Acharya

Engineering a season of floods -Amitangshu Acharya

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published Published on Nov 18, 2019   modified Modified on Jul 23, 2020

-Livemint.com

* Outdated ideas of constructing dams and embankments have increased monsoon floods in India

* The attempt to control rivers is the result of a British colonial hangover, even though western countries are moving away from dams

In 13 states of India this year, the monsoon appeared in the form of floods. The same happened in the Terai region of Nepal, Karachi and the Neelum valley area in Pakistan, several low-lying districts near the Padma river in Bangladesh, and Galle and Matara districts in Sri Lanka. In India, before the devastation of the 2005 Mumbai floods could recede from memory, floods have reappeared regularly in the cities of Mumbai and Chennai, as well as in the states of Assam and Bihar.

In school geography textbooks, we were taught that rivers are productive only when caged with concrete. Our nation’s leaders and engineers decided to place greater trust in dams and embankments than “unpredictable" rivers. This mimicked colonial engineering which attempted to civilize rivers in a subcontinent where civilizations were birthed by rivers. The language of colonial engineering—training and disciplining rivers—has continued to dominate policy.

But insurgent South Asian rivers like the Brahmaputra, Indus, Kosi and Gandak have breached embankments repeatedly, turning engineered floodplains into hydrological dystopias. Dams kept getting built, and embankments kept getting longer and higher. A veteran scholar of rivers and an engineer by training, D.K. Mishra calculated that, in independent India, approximately 35,199km of embankments have been built around rivers as well as 4,728 large dams. Ironically, the flood-affected area of the country increased from 25 million hectares in 1952 to 49 million hectares in 2011.

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Livemint.com, 18 November, 2019, https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/engineering-a-season-of-floods-11573832077930.html


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