The New Nation - Internet Edition

Can Bihar avert another Kosi disaster?

Arnab Pratim Dutta and Alok Gupta

On September 16, the Special Task Force constituted by the Indian prime minister put a figure on the destruction caused by floods in Bihar: Rs 25,000 crore. The Bihar government was seeking Rs 9,000 crore for flood relief; the Centre had released Rs 1,000 crore. Chairperson of the task force S C Jha, member of the prime minister's economic advisory council, advised the premier that rehabilitation and reconstruction work is beyond the capability of either the state or the Union government and suggested seeking assistance from the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank. "Rs 9,000 crore demanded by the state is a hastily prepared figure for rehabilitation and rebuilding. Ground realities are grim and Rs 25,000 crore is the estimated figure for rebuilding the flood-hit zones," said Jha.

The report came as a shocker for the Bihar administration.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said the state's flood damage estimates were a rough figure. "We only prepared a budget for immediate rehabilitation," Kumar said.

The task force team was shocked to find that the work on the washed away Kosi embankment was yet to begin a month after the breach caused the floods on August 18.

"Engineers should have plugged the breach and it's time not for a fight but for action," said Jha. The Centre and the Bihar government cannot agree on who should foot the bill for repairing the breach. They are still fighting over who was responsible for it.

Union Minister of State for Water Resources Jayprakash Yadav accused the Bihar water resources minister Vijender Yadav of neglect.

The state minister, in turn, pointed a finger at the Centre for not convening the Indo-Nepal bilateral meeting on the Kosi embankment security. "The Union government did not convene the crucial bilateral meeting on the Kosi in 2004 and 2005. The breach happened due to lackadaisical maintenance of the embankment by the previous government. That is why in the judicial probe we have included a reference point into the role of the previous state government in maintaining the embankments," said Vijender.

The day the special task force submitted its report, the Nepalese water resources minister Bishnu Prasad Poudel and his Indian counterpart Saifuddin Soz were discussing ways to tame the Kosi. The two agreed to expedite the feasibility study on building a high dam on the river that originates in the Himalayas in Nepal. Media reports state that Nepalese Prime Minister Parchanda met the Bihar chief minister at a lunch hosted by Janata Dal (United) leader Sharad Yadav and affirmed his intention of building a high dam on the Kosi.

N K Singh, the deputy chairperson of the planning commission of Bihar, through articles in national newspapers, has been advocating that a dam on the Kosi can have multiple benefits, including flood moderation, irrigation and power generation.

The idea of a big dam has been junked earlier. It reappears every time the Kosi floods.

High dam: how feasible

A dam on the Kosi was first proposed in 1937 and in 1951, a committee under S C Majumdar, advisor-engineer to the government of West Bengal, was set up to look into the feasibility of the project. The carrot dangled before the King of Nepal was electricity at Rs 0.02 per unit.

The committee pointed out that in 1952 the demand for power in India was 1,100 mw, whereas 1,750 mw was being produced in the country. It also pointed out that between 1940 and 1950 the demand for power had increased by only 50 mw per year, so "a large capital would be blocked unproductively in the name of power production". It recommended shelving the project.

In 1953, the barrage at Hanuman Nagar and embankments on the Kosi came along as the most viable alternative.

The current plans to build a dam on the Kosi are quite different from the 1937 project. In 1991, India and Nepal agreed to study the possibility of a high dam on the river. This is called the Saptakoshi high dam and Sun Kosi diversion scheme. They set up a Joint Team of Experts to prepare a detailed project report. The report was supposed to have been ready by August 2007 but is not yet finished.

According to C Lal, director, flood control, Central Water Commission, investigation work for the project has been delayed because of issues arising from sharing of water between the two countries.

The Saptakoshi high dam at Barahshetra near Chatra valley in Nepal will have a 269 metre tall concrete or rock-fill structure and will produce 3,000 mw at 50 per cent load factor. Eight km downstream a barrage will re-regulate the water released from the Saptakoshi dam. Two canals, the eastern and western Chatra canals, offtaking from the barrage are planned to provide irrigation to Nepal and India. Another canal to be linked to the eastern Chatra canal will take water to the Kosi barrage at Hanuman Nagar.

Ecologists have serious reservations about the dam. According to Sudhirendar Sharma, water expert and director of the Delhi-based Ecological Foundation, a dam will only aggravate the floods. It will take 20 years to build and will be able to capture only 78 per cent of the flow of the river, for only this much per cent of the Kosi's catchment area is in Nepal, he says, adding that 22 per cent, a "dangerous proportion", will still flow.

One of the strongest criticisms against the Saptakoshi high dam is that it will be located in a high seismic zone. According to Dinesh Kumar Mishra, another water expert and former Bihar engineer who has been studying the Kosi since 1984, the Majumdar committee had recommended against a high dam on the Kosi in Nepal citing high seismicity in the region. In 1934, an earthquake measuring 8.3 on the Richter scale had caused widespread devastation. "A breach in a dam as large as this one could spell disaster of an unprecedented scale for Bihar," Mishra warned. There is growing evidence that huge reservoirs can induce earthquakes, adds Himanshu Thakkar of South Asia Network for Dams, Rivers and People.

Siltation, says Thakkar, is another cause for concern. "The proposed dam will silt up sooner than 40 years, according to the government's own reports. The silt from it cannot be released, as it will end up along the Kosi embankment and in the downstream Farakka barrage. Increased siltation could also force the Ganga to change its course and bypass the Farakka barrage," he adds.

Ajaya Dixit of the Kathmandu-based NGO Nepal Water Conservation Foundation questions the multiple benefits the dam is said to provide. "Power generation and flood control are two contradictory issues in a dam. To control floods, the reservoir needs to be kept empty to accommodate flood waters. On the other hand, for power generation one would need to keep the reservoir full all the time," he says.

The National Flood Commission in 1980 had taken note of these problems. "Floods being acute in the basins of rivers originating in the Himalayas, the reservoirs for flood moderation have to be built in the Himalayan region, where there are complex problems to be dealt with due to geological, seismic and topographical constraints. Because of narrow valleys, capacities of reservoirs are not huge. Also, the rivers carry very large silt charge," it noted. These factors limit the economic life of the reservoirs, which, in turn, "affect the economic feasibility of projects".

The embankment fix

Is embanking the Kosi a better approach to controlling floods? The Bihar experiment, with 3,438 km of embankments, shows maybe not. Flood-prone areas in the state have more than doubled since the embankments came up in the 1950s. Embankments increased the flood-prone areas from 14.3 per cent in 1950 to almost 39 per cent of the state's total area in 1990, writes Mishra in his book Trapped Between Devil and Deep Water . Of this close to 65 per cent or 4.18 million hectares lies in embankment-locked plains of north Bihar.

Mishra says embankments only give a false sense of security to the people. "Earlier, when the banks overflowed, the floodwater stayed for at most a week, but now an embankment breach means water-logging for at least four months." Mishra, who headed an independent fact-finding team on the August 18 breach, says just as the embankments stop water from spilling over, they also stop water from joining the river, leading to water stagnation. The Kosi is embanked for 135 km south of Kusaha, the breach site. The flow having left the breached site could not rejoin the original course and had to braid into three abandoned channels of the Kosi.

Central Water Commission engineers working on the Saptakoshi high dam scheme, themselves argue that embankment and barrages are temporary solutions and ineffective in controlling floods. In 2006, two of them, A K Jha and D P Mathuria, submitted a paper on this at the First India Disaster Management Congress organized by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) in Delhi.

"Structures such as Hanuman Nagar Barrage and embankments built a few decades ago on the Kosi on Indo-Nepal border have definitely helped to temporarily check the lateral shifting of the Kosi and in putting the river into a definite channel. But this isolated engineering approach has proved to be too insufficient in (achieving) its objectives as at present the pond of the barrage at Hanuman Nagar is almost full of sediments. Soon the embankments would be ineffective in controlling the Kosi floods. It would thus be naïve to embark upon finding a solution of this menace through structural measures alone in the form of a high dam without understanding the characteristics of floods in general and the Kosi river in particular," states the paper, 'Kosi-a review of flood genesis and attempts to solve this problem'.

The Kosi is known to change its course, therefore, a proper study of the factors causing the shift should help in developing ways to cope with its floods.

The government is, however, sticking to its engineering approach. The High Level Expert Team, set up by the Centre after the floods, will formulate guidelines on the long-term upkeep of the Kosi dam, while Bihar's Kosi Breach Closure Advisory Team will look into the cause of the breach.

Interlinking of rivers is another structural measure for moderating floods, though it is still far-fetched. The National Water Development Authority, on the Supreme Court's directions, had identified five river linkages in Bihar, involving the Kosi, Ghaghara, Sone and Ganga rivers. The sixth Gandak-Ganga link canal is indirectly related to Bihar. There has been no geomorphological study on interlinking projects, but two reports of the Bihar government in 2003 and 2004 suggested that interlinking of rivers was not a good idea because the state needed water to irrigate its own land and water transferred would insignificant for flood moderation.

Way forward

A high dam is risky. Embankments are temporary technical fixes. So what should Bihar do? There are no quick-fix solutions to the floods, says Rohan D'souza, assistant professor, Centre for Studies in Science Policy, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. "You cannot stop flooding. Instead one needs to know how to live with floods t. Allow natural flooding of the river," he says.

The only way to revive natural flooding, that happens gradually, is by ensuring proper drainage of water, which means removing congestions like roads, railway lines and embankments or providing adequate channels for easy drainage of water through the floodplains.

Bihar has a high density of railway route. "Major roads and railway lines (in Bihar) run from east to west, thus cutting across the natural drainage as rivers flow from north to south. Inadequate waterways on bridges build up volume and velocity of flood waters," states the report, Floods, Flood Plains and Environmental Myths, of the Centre for Science and Environment published in 1991.

Mishra and Sharma question why the river should not be allowed to follow the new course. "Given that the breach is unlikely to be plugged before March, by which time a sizeable population would have moved to other locations, should the river not be allowed to follow its new course?" asks Sharma.

As it became clear that the August 18 flood was a result of lack of maintenance of embankments, demand is growing for renegotiating the 1954 Kosi agreement-amended in 1968-that makes India solely responsible for operating, maintaining and repairing the barrage and the embankments. The Kosi High Level Committee (KHLC), headed by the chairperson of the Ganga Flood Control Committee (GFCC), is responsible for overseeing the maintenance work.

According to an official of the Bihar Water Resources Department, KHLC failed to take adequate steps to avert floods. "The repair and maintenance work on the river was like applying band-aid, whereas it needed a bypass surgery. Most of the recommendations of the state engineers were not taken into account by KHLC and GFCC, including anti-siltation work of the channels which lead to the breach," he said.

The country also needs to improve its disaster management. The head of Bihar's disaster management committee, headed by the chief minister, had no clue about the breach till a day after. NDMA, headed by the prime minister, came to know about it, a day late, not through any modern surveillance method, but through a news report on the Internet.

"We were taken by surprise. There were a few National Disaster Response Force personnel in Patna, who were dispatched immediately, while another two battalions of the force stationed in Bhubaneswar and Kolkata were airlifted to Patna," says an NDMA official. The two battalions could reach the affected areas only by August 21.

(Source: Down To Earth, New Delhi India)

The just framework for climate

Sunita Narain

Let's cut to the chase. If we are serious about climate change then we have to be serious about changing (drastically) the way the world generates and uses its energy. But even as the rich world talks glibly about 'decarbonisation' of its economy it has done precious little to reinvent its energy system and to wean itself from its fossil fuel addiction. Between 1990 and 2005, emissions from fossil fuel have actually increased, in these countries. In this period, their emissions from energy industries have increased by 24 per cent and from transport by a massive 28 per cent. The only reductions, marginal at that, have been in the manufacturing and construction sectors, which many would say is only because production has moved to China and other countries.

Forget the grand energy transition towards renewables. We are on reverse gear. Between 1900 and 2000, world energy use grew more than ten times.

And even though energy from renewable sources increased nearly five-fold during the century, its share in total energy use dropped from 42 per cent to 19 per cent. By 2004, this share was down to just 13 per cent.

What is more, the bulk of the renewable energy budget was made up of old renewables like hydroelectricity and poverty related renewables like biomass burning---women cooking food on stoves using firewood. The contribution of new renewables---wind, solar, tidal or geothermal was as little as 0.9 per cent of the world's energy supply.

Even as the world quibbles and works overtime to shift the burden of reducing emissions to countries like China and India, it is forgetting this core mission. Clearly, it is then time we took the lead to put forward the framework for an effective climate agreement for the entire world.

The framework must be based on the two climate imperatives. One, to share the global commons equitably, because we know that cooperation is not possible without justice. Two, to create conditions so that the world, particularly the energy-deprived world, can make the transition to a low carbon economy. It is here that the opportunity lies.

The tragedy of the atmospheric common has been the lack of rights to this global ecological space. As a result, countries have borrowed or drawn heavily and without control. They have emitted greenhouse gases far in excess to what the earth can withstand. This was because they could emit without limits or quotas and were "free riding" on this natural capital. Some researchers have called this the natural debt of the North as against the financial debt of the South. In this situation, curtailing the emissions can only be done through the creation of rights and entitlements of each nation to the atmosphere so that future responsibilities are clearly demarcated. In other words, the world needs to adopt the concept of equal per capita entitlements to greenhouse gas emissions.

The entitlements can be based on the apportionment of the world's natural sinks---its oceans, which absorb and clean emissions---to every individual. The other option is to distribute the global emissions budget among nations in the form of equal per capita entitlements. For instance, if we assume a target of 450 ppm of carbon dioxide equivalent then each person is entitled to 2 tonnes per year. In 2005, the average emissions of the world already crossed 4 tonnes per person per year with US and Australia leading with 20 tonnes per person per year. The entitlements taken together will be the "permissible" level of emission of each country, which can be the basis of trading between nations. The country, which exceeds its annual quota of carbon dioxide, can trade with those countries with "permissible" emissions. Countries with permissible emissions will have the financial incentive to keep their emissions as low as possible and to invest in low-carbon trajectories.

The equal per capita entitlements framework is then the tool to make the much needed energy transformation in the world.

As much as the world needs to design a system of equity between nations, nations of the world need to design a system of equity within the nation. It is not the rich in India who emit less than their share of the global quota. It is the poor in India, who do not have access to energy who provide us the breathing space.

Currently it is estimated that only 31 per cent of rural households use electricity. Connecting all of India's villages to grid-based electricity will be expensive and difficult. It is here that the option of leapfrogging to off-grid solutions based on renewable energy technologies becomes most economically viable. If India were to assign its national entitlements on an equal per capita basis, it would provide both the resources and the incentives for current low energy users to adopt zero-emission technologies. In this way, too, a rights-based framework will stimulate powerful demand for investments in new renewable energy technologies.

Let us be clear. Climate change is a make-or-break challenge before the world. It forces us, perhaps for the first time in our history, to realise that we exist as one in one Earth. It tells us that there are limits to growth and more importantly that growth will have to be shared among all. The big question is will we prove to be equal to the challenge. We have no choice. There is no other way.

(Sunita Narain is the editor, Down To Earth Magazine, New Delhi, India)

What fallout from Indian nuclear deal?

Paul Reynolds

Under deal, US accepts Indian status as nuclear weapons state. The nuclear deal between the United States and India raises major questions about the spread of nuclear weapons as well as illustrating India's new importance as a strategic American partner.

The deal was finally agreed by the US Senate on Wednesday, having previously been given approval by the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Under it, India is now able to receive supplies and technology for its growing nuclear power industry, ending a boycott imposed by nuclear supplier states (through the Nuclear Suppliers' Group) because it has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India can keep and develop its nuclear weapons programme, but has to open up certain of its nuclear power plants to IAEA inspection.

IAEA view

For some, like the IAEA, it is the best of a bad situation, in that it at least gets India under a more substantial inspection regime than it is currently is subject to and raises the prospect of more to come. The IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said: "I believe the agreement is good for India, is good for the world, is good for non-proliferation, is good for our collective effort to move towards a world free from nuclear weapons."

However, critics argue that it has driven a wedge into the NPT because it in effect accepts that India has nuclear weapons while not being a signatory to the treaty and ends sanctions against it.

A 'disaster'

"It is a disaster for the non-proliferation regime," said Mark Fitzpatrick, nuclear expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

"The perception will be that it solidifies a double standard in favour of India. Pakistan, Iran and North Korea will use its as an excuse to carry on with their activities. Others, like Egypt for example, might in the future use this as an example for them as well.

"It will create a fear in Pakistan that India will outpace it. At the moment, they both have about 60 to 70 nuclear weapons, and are capable of making five to 10 more each year.

"This agreement will enable India to import uranium for its civilian nuclear energy plants and free up its own uranium for weapons, possibly increasing its capability by five to 10 times. India is excluding some of its nuclear plants from inspection which indicates that it wants to keep its options open.

"The Bush administration sold this as a non-proliferation benefit but oversold it and to make it so, both India and the US have to make a reality of the dormant proposed treaty to stop the production of fissile material.

"Iran meanwhile has made unexpectedly rapid progress in the enrichment of uranium. It is producing 2.5 kilos of low enriched uranium a day and could have enough to be able to produce sufficient highly enriched material for a nuclear weapon by next March, if it chose to do so." Iran says it will not do so.

Strong support

However there is strong support for the deal from the US and Indian governments. The US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is paying a visit to India to mark the passage of the agreement. It seals the new relationship between the US and India, which was marked by coolness during the Cold War. Philip H Gordon, Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy at Brookings Institution in Washington, also argues in favour of the agreement and wrote: "Opponents of the deal insist that its approval would send the wrong message to other countries that are currently threatening the nuclear non-proliferation regime, such as Iran. In fact, the deal does not signal international indifference to proliferation.

"The pact shows that the international community is prepared to distinguish between countries that abide by, and are increasing co-operation with, the nuclear non-proliferation regime - like India - and those that defy it.

"In an ideal world, rejection of the nuclear deal would preserve the sanctity of the nuclear non-proliferation regime and make the world a safer place.. In the world we live in, however, it would do little to prevent non-proliferation and significantly harm India, the United States, and their ability to do good things together."

Among the "good things" to be done "together" is expected to be the sale to India of US technology for nuclear power generation. Russia and France are also in line to sell India their nuclear power wares.

India certainly needs more generation capacity and a by-product of the agreement could be that global warming might be reduced if India becomes less reliant on coal for producing its electricity.

(Paul Reynolds is the world affairs correspondent, BBC News website http:// news.bbc. co.uk/ 2/hi /south_asia/ 7650209.stm)

Intellectual property 'needs revamp'

Brett Cherry

New intellectual property (IP) strategies must be adopted if developing countries are to benefit from innovations in biotechnology, says a group of international experts.

The IP system for biotechnology lags behind other industries in making its products and research more accessible, according to an expert group from The Innovation Partnership (TIP), a non-profit organisation funded by the Canadian government and organised through McGill University, Canada.

Richard Gold, president of TIP and chair of the expert group, says biotech companies and governments worldwide will have to let go of their "old IP approach" if they are to use their research to address disease and hunger in developing countries.

The study finds that companies fear developing countries do not respect IP laws, while developing countries worry that the developed world is expanding its IP rights without regard for their needs.

"There is certainly this view that the patent system being imposed on low- and middle-income countries is basically a transfer of rent from developing countries to high-income countries with very little return," says Gold.

"We have internationalised high-income country IP laws and imposed them on lower- and middle-income countries for whom the system we have developed for ourselves may not work."

In order to bridge this mistrust, the study recommends 'patent pools' - consortiums of biotech companies, nongovernmental organisations, manufacturers and national governments that share patents - to deliver medicines, foods and other products to people in developing countries.

For example, UNITAID - an international drug purchase facility - operates a patent pool to formulate medicines specifically for developing countries to manufacture and distribute at a low price.

The authors say patent pools would licence production, of a drug for instance, out to manufacturers who would be overseen by an independent technology assessment organisation to ensure standards of new biotech products from developing countries.

And new IP strategies like patent pools could also assist technological development in the developing world, says Gold. "There is a lot of technology being developed in low- and middle-income countries, but they don't have access to the financing and business models to bring that technology forward."

To make medicines more accessible, the authors recommend pharmaceutical companies make substantial investments in public-private partnerships that will make the knowledge behind those medicines available in the public domain so countries can develop their own.

The report also recommends collaboration between universities from high- and low-income countries, especially developing postgraduate programmes enabling students from developing countries to focus on research in their home countries.

"This has the benefit of allowing these researchers to focus on problems at home without abandoning them, but also teach their community and build up an infrastructure in those countries so they can stay at home and continue to address the problem," Gold told SciDev.Net.