people were not caught off guard in the same manner as they were in 1978. But the flood in 2000 damaged crops extensively, a large number of livestock in the villages were killed, and the water remained stagnant for a long time. He observed that, though the villagers are still trying to pick up the threads of their life after that event in many places, they still live a fragile existence by a river which has devastated their lives in the past, and there is no guarantee that it will not do the same again.
minor breaches, then I could imagine how dire things can be when the river becomes really destructive.
I had a long talk with the officer in charge of the water monitoring station this time. By now he was perhaps a bit more familiar with me, and his reserve had given away to frankness. He told me that there is little genuine interest for the plight of the people of this land. He gave me some figures regarding the flood and consequent damage. He said the river has a maximum discharge capacity of 300,000 cusecs [i.e. cubic meters per second]. If the river flows at this level, a 10 kilometer-long stretch of the Guskara Bhedia road will be breached. A slight increase in water will mean the inundation of about 10 villages, and as each village has about 5000 live animals, the loss of animal life alone will be 50,000.
Most probably he was talking about bigger villages like Rajatpur, not the small collection of huts by the river, because it is not possible that the small bank dweller villages would have 5,000 animals. The cropland damage will stand at 2,135 acres. All of these would amount to damage of 267.7 million Rupees. This was a government estimate, probably a fairly conservative one. He said the main reason for the flood was the rainfall in the catchment areas and said that Satkahonia was the oldest monitoring station on the Ajoy, and had flood records
from 1916. He asserted that huge floods always happened in years when the Monsoon had been extremely vigorous, thereby proving that it was a natural event.
However, without blaming the dam, he acknowledged that in the absence of proper monitoring mechanisms and properly trained personnel, flood management was an issue existing only on paper. He said the river has no central commission on it, unlike the neighboring Damodar River, which is governed by a state planning body. He pointed out that the absence of authority has predictably led to an absence of responsibility.
And what about the people living by the river side? It seemed to me that the small bank dweller villages are almost forgotten in the government and planning levels. The officer said that the villagers were mainly refugees who migrated during the partition of the country in 1947 from what is now Bangladesh.
They have no home apart from the riverside, and they farm tiny plots and can even yield four crops a year. I did not see any appreciation in his tone for the indigenous knowledge of farming that these ‘refugee’ farmers possess, by virtue of which they can produce four crops a year without the aid of modern farming technology. And they reap their crops year after year from the same patch of land, thereby proving that their farming practices are probably more sustainable than
the practices with pesticides and chemicals that damage the soil and the ecosystem.
He told me that another reason behind the devastation of the 1978 flood was the shifting of the river’s course.
I was curious to hear the tale of the change of the river’s course again.
The officer was telling me that the 1978 flood altered the course of the river, and it has been flowing in that course since 1978. The historian in Santiniketan told me the opposite. He told that the 1978 flood caused the water to flow through the
‘old channel.’ Surely, only one of these claims can be correct. When I asked him further, the officer told me that about 5 kilometers from the railway bridge where I began my survey is the village of Bilsanda, and the river used to flow by that village and then took an elaborate turn to approach the railway bridge. Now, he said, I could see with my own eyes that the river is flowing in a much straighter course.
I went to see for myself whether what had really happened could be seen from the evidence present now. Our motorcycle descended along the earthen road from the railway bridge. We went past the hapless Budhra gauging station and drove on over the embankment. After a while, we came to a big turn in the river embankment. The turn itself stretched for at least 500 meters, if not more. But
beyond the turn there was no river. I could see that the river had retreated by quite a distance and eventually I came to a point where there was a bifurcation in the river’s course. The river is indeed following a straighter path now, with the section without water, bounded by the meandering embankment, still retaining traces of the river’s existence years ago. The bed of golden sand was still there, with small pools of water in the sands. A woman was looking after a cow by the embankment.
I asked where the old river was. ‘Right here,’ she replied. I asked her when the last big flood took place. ‘Six or seven years ago’, was her answer. She added that the 1978 flood was a bigger one and it caused the river to flow in a different direction.
Her words were virtually echoed by a young farmer in the village of Bilsanda, from where the river changed its course. He told me that his grandfather saw the river flowing by the village, but now it has retreated to nearly a kilometer away.
As we walked along the embankment, the officer’s words were matched by the evidence. The river ‘changed’ its course in 1978, and flowed through the villages, and that was perhaps what caught most people off guard.
CHAPTER 5:PATTERNS IN FIELDWORK DATA
All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.
Gautama Buddha7
During my trips to the field, some issues stood out. The issues have been thematically arranged in this chapter, and the most important and relevant bits of data has been reordered under appropriate categories.
5.1 Urban Lures and Unfulfilled Promises: Finding the Concept of Liminality