India: Farakka Barrage - An Environmental Mistake
- From: Muhammad Javed Iqbal <kaleemjavediqbal@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:20:12 -0700 (PDT)
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".
Muhammad Javed Iqbal
.
- Prev by Date: India: Bangladesh missiles part of China’s encirclement - Experts
- Next by Date: Re: The Indian kidney bazaar
- Previous by thread: India: Bangladesh missiles part of China’s encirclement - Experts
- Next by thread: Satan Or Devil
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
