Rats now being blamed for massive floods in India

NEW DELHI: Poor rats are the easy targets of the officials in Bihar.

Earlier, they were held responsible for the mysterious disappearance of around one million liquor bottles from the police store rooms.

Now, they have been blamed for causing deluge to the state this year after the Nitish Kumar government was caught unaware when floods unleashed massive destruction last month, damaging 2,500 homes and claiming 514 lives to date.

The bizarre claim has been made by none other than Bihar’s water resources minister Lalan Singh, known to be very close to chief minister Nitish Kumar.

“We have been able to find the main reason behind the devastating floods this year. Neither the heavy rains in the catchment areas of Nepal nor the poor preparation by the state government is responsible for this. Rather, it’s the rats who have brought the floods this year,” he told the media after a review of the flood situation on Friday.

Explaining his point further, the minister said the villagers normally tend to store grains on the embankments which attract rats. They later cause big holes in the embankments to store grains.

The holes weakened the embankments. Finally, even little pressure from flood waters led to a breach in the embankments, he claimed.

As per reports, several big rivers such as Kamla Balan, Kosi, Gandak and Bagmati broke their mud embankments this time, displacing nearly one million people and causing floods to half of the state.

However, even his own colleague has questioned Lalan’s claim.

“If rats had caused holes in the embankments and weakened them, then why did the government, in a written reply in the Bihar assembly, assure us that all the embankments were secure?

“Officials are responsible for floods and they should be held accountable,” said BJP legislator Mithilesh Tiwari.

The flood situation remained grim in Uttar Pradesh, where 2.8 million people were affected and the toll climbed to 108 with four more deaths, while flash floods and landslides triggered by heavy rains in Himachal Pradesh yesterday claimed the lives of three persons.

However, the situation in delugehit Bihar and Assam continued to improve and no new deaths were reported in both the states.

In the national capital, a portion of a mountainous garbage dump in east Delhi's Ghazipur collapsed because of heavy rain, killing two people.

A day after torrential rain – the heaviest in three years – lashed Delhi, a section of the pile in a landfill slumped over a car and three two-wheelers, pushing the vehicles off the road and into a canal. Five people were rescued from the canal.

In Uttar Pradesh, raging waters of rivers emanating from Nepal continued to cause havoc in vast swathes of land.

Citing a flood report compiled till yesterday, the relief commissioner's office said 300,000 people had taken shelter in relief camps in the affected districts.