THEY FOUND THE MONSOONS CALM, THEN CAME THE DEADLY STORMS
Flooding in South Asia has claimed over a thousand lives in unforeseen events By Suhasini Raj and Jeffrey Gettleman
As the floodwaters rose, Phoolvati, a poor and landless woman living in a farming village in Bihar state, scrambled to grab some jewellery, a soccer ball and a wad of rupees — the last of the family’s meagre savings. She hurriedly stuffed it all into a big aluminium box.
Men from the village of Murmala were rowing a small boat as fast as they could, to get people out before they drowned.
“Take this,” she told her 10-yearold daughter, Bahomani. There wasn’t enough room in the boat for everyone. “I’ll see you on the other side.”
Phoolvati watched as her daughter climbed in, clutching the box. Soon the boat set out into a wall of rain.
Northern India, one of the country’s poorest regions, has been hit by some of the worst monsoon storms in recent years. Local officials pointed to a highway overpass about five metres above the ground and said that for the first time in living memory the water had risen above the bridge.
In a particularly severe season of storms and flooding around the world, the devastation in South Asia has been among the worst anywhere. The rains aren’t over yet, and already in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, more than 1,200 people have lost their lives.
Deadly flooding is a sad annual fact in this region. The average number of flood deaths over the past two decades is around 2,000 each year, according to the International Disaster Database in Belgium.
But even by South Asian standards, what began as a slow storm season is entering a particularly intense second half. And despite all of India’s economic growth and the rapid infusion of technology, millions of people in both rural and urban areas said they had no idea that dangerous weather was coming.
In northern Bihar villages, the state that was worst hit this past month, the reek of fermenting grain lingers. Sacks of rice from government warehouses had been left outside during the storms. Now inedible, they are full of dead worms.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced. More than 20,000 homes have been destroyed.
In the village of Murmala, in a fertile farming area, hundreds of displaced people are marooned in a closed-down, lightless middle school, getting chewed up by malarial mosquitoes.
Many have no land of their own and eke out a living by working on other people’s rice paddies. When the paddies are under several feet of water, there is no work.
For Abdul Rauf, a father of six, life has never been worse.
“We did not buy any new clothes this Eid, and this has never happened before,” he said, referring to the Muslim holiday last week. “We go to sleep hungry, unable to even fill our stomachs with water because the hand pumps are churning out such dirty water.”
The Bihar state administration compensates families around $6,200 for each member killed in the floods. But for countless people the checks have not come or the names have been wrong.
Every year in South Asia, from June to September, the monsoon rains thunder down. July is often the worst month, but this year it wasn’t so bad.
The rainfall had been so light, actually, that government officials said they were even thinking of starting irrigation pumps.
But on Aug 11, that changed. Dark clouds formed over the fields and it began to rain hard. For three days straight, it poured. This area lies just south of the India-Nepal border, and water coursing through Himalayan rivers had nowhere to go. Nepal opened a huge dam upriver, sending a torrent downstream.
“We were taken completely by surprise,” said Pankaj Dixit, a district magistrate, the government official who runs the local administration. “We had no information whatsoever from any agency about the rising water levels.”
Weather models predict that over the next 30 years India will experience more extreme rainfall.
Asit Biswas, an environmental scientist and co-founder of the Third World Centre for Water Management in Mexico, said that India desperately needed better drainage systems. And he criticised politicians who complain about climate change without doing anything to help.
“It then becomes an ‘act of God,’ and thus they are not responsible,” he said. “Sadly, South Asia’s water and flood problems are man-made, due to poor planning and management.”
Murmala and the villages around here would usually be buzzing with activity at this time, with people out working the paddies and fields, and children taking the dirt roads to and from school.
These villages are now concentrations of idleness, frustration, suffering and grief.
Phoolvati is still haunted by the image of her daughter, Bahomani, clutching the box with the family’s valuables as the rescue boat pushed away from her house. Phoolvati’s husband was also in the boat.
As she watched, the wind whipped up, creating white caps on the water. The boat tipped over.
The water closed over her daughter and husband. Two days later, in a rice paddy, their bodies were found, intertwined. Bahomani was clinging to her father’s neck.