Bangla floods have two faces

Rivers are Bangladesh's arteries and flood waters are its lifeblood. Kunda Dixit of Inter Press Service reports.

TANAIL, Bangladesh (IPS): The rains were late, northern Bangladesh had shriveled with drought. So villagers across the land performed ritual frog weddings, a symbol of fertility.

Amphibian nuptials are supposed the rain gods, and this time they seemed to have worked. The first squalls of the monsoon finally arrived in early June in Tangail.

Bangladesh is situated on the floodplain of the combined delta of South Asia's two biggest river systems: the Ganga and Brahmaputra. Most of the country is only a few metres above the high tide mark, and is crisscrossed by an ever-changing maze of meandering rivers that empty into the Bay of Bengal.

The monsoons make the Himalayan foothills to the north the wettest region on earth. Within a few weeks, the swollen rivers will reach Bangladesh, inundating 20 percent of the land.

The world has an image of misery, suffering and loss caused by floods in Bangladesh. But these rivers are Bangladesh's arteries and the annual floods are the lifeblood of the country's 120 million people.

Soon the dry ox-blown lakes and the channels near Tangail will fill up, overflow. Central Bangladesh will turn into a vast inland sea. Only the railway embankments, the tops of trees and electricity lines will be poking out of the surface of the muddy waters.

The water always bring a fresh load of fertile alluvium and the floodwaters teem with fish. The floods also wash the land of accumulated chemicals and pesticides and charge depleted aquifers.

Once every few decades, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra peak simultaneously and Bangladesh gets really bad floods -- like the one in 1988 that inundated three-fourths of the land and made a staggering 33 million people temporarily homeless.

High-profile crises like the 1988 floods galvanized donors and the government to chart out one of the most ambitious flood control programs in the world. It is called the Flood Action Plan (FAP) and is a combination of 64 major infrastructure projects that will cost US$2.5 billion and take at least ten years to complete.

FAP is based on initiatives by France, Japan, the United States Aid Agency and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and is coordinated by the World Bank. Just the studies and detailed design have already cost $150million.

But strong opposition from Bangladeshi activists and international pressure groups forced donors to re-evaluate FAP. Even the UNDP had enough doubts about it to fund an independent study, which suggested that the whole concept of flood control needed to be re-examined.

The UNDP's independent commission felt FAP favored the rich in a country where nearly half the people are landless. Only one percent of the FAP investment had gone into non-infrastructure areas that benefited the poor.

Nevertheless, Bangladesh is going ahead with experimental flood-control projects to show the benefits of flood control. Tangail is one of the areas chosen for the pilot phase, and going by the reaction of the local people there isn't much support. Noor Jehan Khan, a Tangail community organizer opposed to FAP, says, "The flood waters is our life. Our ancestors have learned to live and benefit from floods."

Noor Jehan and her sisters have organized meetings, picketed the site of embankments and sluice gates and the district government offices. On one occasion last year, they were beaten by the local police. Some of them were also arrested.

Villagers complain they had no say in FAP. So far, the only people who seem to have benefited are the local politicians, contractors and laborers hired on a daily-wage to build the embankments.

The dikes that are supposed to protect the fields have cut Tangail off from the nearby Jamuna River. Despite the rains, the fields are arid, and a nearby river channel which this time of year would be full of water is dry because the sluice-gates now "regulate" the inflow.

"The FAP has blocked our water supply. The streams and canals have dried up, and the FAP trucks now use the river beds as roads," says Zohra Begum, adding: "No one ever asked us what we thought about floods. If they had, we would have told them this flood control plan is nonsense. We need the floods. We cannot do without them."

Activists in Dhaka have lobbied hard with their government and international donors to stop FAP, and so far they seem to have succeeded. "This is a project that will decide the fate of Bangladesh, but it has not involved the people. So far, only a few engineers and donors have been making the decisions," says Hamidul Haq of the voluntary group UST (the Bengali acronym for People's Development Team).

Officials in Dhaka are disappointed that FAP is not making any progress with the people. They do not buy the argument that floods are good. Says one official: "Anyone who sees the damage that floods cause here every year will understand. Floods are not romantic, they kill people and damage crops."

But international water experts opposed to FAP have warned that major flood control schemes like the ones on the Mississippi River in the United States have shown how useless it is to tamper with nature. They say a better way is to restore flood plains to their original function.

In Bangladesh, FAP would build nearly 4,000 km of embankments on the main rivers. Critics say Bangladesh already has about 7,000 km of embankments built over the past 40 years and studies have shown that they actually make floods worse and exacerbate the much greater annual destruction caused by river erosion.

The arguments against FAP now seem to be having an effect. In May, the World Bank decided to postpone a scheduled meeting of donors in Dhaka for the second phase of FAP. Meanwhile, in Tangail's village school, Noor Jehan and Zohra Begum watch the rain come down in torrents, shake their heads, and tell a group of visitors: "You must take our voice to those who are giving money to build this folly."