How long will it take to recover from flood fury?

Area ravaged by severe flood takes up to 10 years to return to normal, according to experts

NEW DELHI: The waters may be receding in Kerala but previous post-flood scenarios in other states suggest it could take years for the southern state to help rebuild its people’s lives, destroyed in one of the worst floods in a century, and some more to implement measures that could significantly minimise the impact of a similar disaster.

The Kerala government has estimated a loss of ~20,000 crore, with Idukki, Malappuram, Kottayam and Ernakulam districts being the worst affected. Government officials say the state’s topmost priority is to rescue people and provide lakhs of the affected with relief materials. They, however, admit that rebuilding the state will be a “daunting task”.

“Tough days are ahead,” chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said Monday when asked about his government’s plans to start the reconstruction work. “Over a million people are in the relief camps and as of now they are our priority. We are assessing human and material damage,” he added.

The government estimates about one lakh buildings, which includes people’s houses, have been damaged,over 10,000km of highways and roads and hundreds of bridges have been washed away, and crops in millions of hectares of land have been lost in the floods.

The government will start the process to accurately assess the damage after the relief and rescue work is over, an official said.

Experts say that an area under severe flood could take up to a decade to fully recover. A 2015 paper by Prakash Tripathi of Ambedkar University, titled ‘Flood Disaster in India: An Analysis of trend and Preparedness’, pointed out that completing relief and rehabilitation work takes about two years on average while the ecological recovery could take up to more than five years.

Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network of Dams, Rivers and People spoke of “different aspects of recovery” — the human aspect, which involves rehabilitation, and creation of systems, which enables reducing the impact of future floods. “We cannot stop floods. But we can minimise their impact. For that, some structural re-engineering to ensure that the rivers can flow freely is needed. This takes time.”

Thakkar isn’t off the mark. Four years after the devastating floods in Kashmir, which saw its 2.61 lakh homes partially or completely damaged, the recovery work is still not over even though the government has paid compensation to those affected.

The state and central governments differ on their estimates of the damage caused in the Valley.

Chief engineer in the state’s irrigation and flood control department, MM Shahnawaz said in the first phase, they filled all breaches and strengthened the embankments. “From 32,000 cusecs of water, we increased river Jhelum’s carrying capacity to 41,000 cusecs. We are further planning to increase it to 60,000 cusecs in coming years,” he said.

In the second phase, a Spanish company has been engaged to formulate a comprehensive flood mitigation and river management policy, and the project will be completed in five to seven years. As a long-term plan, the state plans to construct storage dams for the tributaries or a separate flood spill channel.

In Uttarakhand, upper reaches were ravaged by the devastating flash floods in June 2013, impacting around nine million people and killing nearly 200. Amit Singh Negi, secretary disaster management, said, “We received over ~1,000 crore from the Centre. The money has been disbursed but the strengthening of roads and other structures is going on.”

State government officials, however, refused to comment on the failure to remove encroachments on the floodplains, which still poses a huge bottleneck to prevent the re-run of 2013.

The northern parts of Bihar were ravaged by the huge breach in the embankment of Kosi river in 2008. It affected 3.3 million people and left 527 dead. Around 6.6 million hectares of agriculture land became unfit for cultivation.

Ten years on, the Bihar government is still struggling to provide an alternative to the farmers. The relief and rehabilitation work started by the state government, though helped mitigate the problem, is also still not over.

The World Bank-aided Kosi Flood Recovery Project of $220 million, which was initially supposed to be completed by September 2014, was extended to June 2018. The bank is also funding Bihar Kosi Basin Development project of $250 million with completion deadline of March 2023.

Assam has taken a large number of steps such as building embankments to minimise the damage but, as per the river board, the impact had been minimal as people still live in floodplains. The board, however, suggested in a 2017 report that building of storage dams upstream of the river can control the impact of floods, which the activists say could prove to be “disastrous” as it has happened in Kerala.

“We have to learn from Kerala that just development big storage dams may not help. When it rains heavily, the dam gates have been opened which results in excessive flooding. Instead, we need to work on flood management, which basically means removing encroachments from traditional water flow zones and allowing excess water to flow smoothly into oceans,” Thakkar said.