India and Nepal are trading barbs in an escalating dispute over the failure of flood defences that left hundreds of villages underwater and millions of people destitute.
An embankment along the Kosi River in southern Nepal was breached on August 18, allowing the river to pour down a course it had abandoned many years previously.
Though the flood defences are 12km inside the Nepal border, India is responsible for their maintenance to protect its own population downstream.
But Nepal says India failed in its duties, allowing the river to change course and empty huge volumes of water on to unsuspecting regions of India’s north-east Bihar state.
About 60 000 people have been made homeless in Nepal, with anywhere up to five million affected in India, aid agencies say.
”Under the agreement between India and Nepal, the Indians were in charge of maintaining the spurs and dams,” Durga Bhandari, the chief official of Sunsari district, on Nepal’s border with India, said.
”The change of course in the river occurred because the defences on the Nepal side were not repaired on time.”
However, Indian officials, facing mounting pressure over the disaster, say their efforts to reinforce the barrages were thwarted by the Nepalis, who they say also failed in their duties to clear silt build-up.
An Indian embassy spokesperson in Kathmandu said India had sent engineers to repair the damaged defences, but that they were prevented from carrying out their work.
”If security concerns had been looked into and local cooperation was forthcoming, the tragedy would have been averted,” Gopal Bagley said.
The engineers told Indian newspapers they had noticed weaknesses in the Kosi embankment back in April but were chased away from repairing it last month.
”Our team was assaulted and physically pushed back from the site by both locals and Nepalese officials,” chief engineer Debi Razak told the Hindustan Times, saying the hostile reception was due to a labour dispute.
Under a 1954 agreement, Nepal allowed India to construct the series of dams and spurs on the Kosi, which flows out of the Himalayas in Nepal down into the mighty Ganges.
The defences were completed in 1959, but only had a projected lifespan of 30 years, said Dev Narayan Yadav, a local activist who campaigns for the 150 000 Nepalis who live on the river banks and in nearby villages.
”They should have been replaced in the late 1980s but they never were,” Yadav said.
Somnath Poudel, a former official from Nepal’s Ministry of Water, said corruption and lack of national cooperation were partly to blame for the disaster.
”Authorities failed to look after the Kosi Dam because of widespread bribery and corruption on both sides,” said Poudel.
In Nepal, large environmental projects are riddled with corruption, according to Ashish Thapa, executive director of Transparency International.
”In all large projects that involve a lot of money there is a tendency for lots to be siphoned off as commissions and bribes,” said Thapa.
”The corruption causes the quality of the projects to suffer, which can result in disasters like the one we are seeing now.”
Frantic efforts were now under way in Nepal to shore up further spurs that are in danger of collapse and prevent further flooding.
But the peak of the river’s flow is not expected for another six weeks — leaving the victims facing many months of hardship. — AFP
