Report: Chayan Kundu Programme: Special Correspondent
Telecast: Saturday (12.07.03) at 9:30 pm
Thursday (17.07.03) at 4:30 pm
Ganga, the sacred thread that runs through the broad shoulders of this country, has a dark side to it .The mighty river has left lakhs homeless in Murshidabad and Malda districts of West Bengal.
Several case studies, facts and figures justify the magnitude of the problem of Ganga- Padma erosion. Ganga has so far affected around 10 lakh people. Properties and land worth Rs 4000 crore have been washed away in Murshidabad and Malda districts due to the massive and continuous erosion of embankment in River Padma.
From Farakka to Jalangi - this stretch of 104 kms - is considered to be the most affected zone. The river has already engulfed 600 sq kms of area along with vast agricultural land.
Every monsoon the river becomes dangerous and her ferocity coupled with her changing course and high tide make the lives of villagers miserable. It is found that an entire panchayat of Murshidabad has gone deep inside the river-bed. In some places the people have even lost their nationality due to this devastation as the old land have been completely eroded and new islands (no man’s land of Indo-Bangla border) have formed.
But its not Ganga, the river in front of which thousands bow their heads in deference, who`s been putting her devotees through this hell.
Even local panchayat, Municipal and Parliament elections are being fought here on the issue of river erosion.
Geographically this massive erosion can not be considered as a natural activity. Experts find it as an after effect of the Farakka Barrage, which was built in 1972. Building proper riverbanks can only check this. But embankment of the two sides of River Padma is pending since then.
Here corruption and politics play the spoilsport. The local political leaders are siphoning off crores of central funds with the nexus of state irrigation department officials and local contractors in the name of building new embankment by concrete "boulders". Each season they begin work just before the onset of the Monsoons. As construction is still underway when the river begins to swell, the boulders each year are washed away. This enables them to get fresh sanctions for the embankments. They don`t even have to provide proof of construction as they show it as "washed away".
Building river embankments every year just before the monsoon has now become a most lucrative business for all political parties.

So much land engulfed, so many rendered homeless. All this should certainly be enough to set the alarm bells ringing. But none among those who are at the helm of the affairs is ready to press the panic buttons as yet. The misery of all those who have suffered the onslaught of the mighty river, it seems, is not enough to jolt the authorities out of their slumber.
Recently, when the senior Congress leaders in the state took the issue in the Parliament and asked for central intervention into the matter. But with their astonishment they came to know that the central government had already asked the state to submit a master plan for the anti-erosion project, which the state irrigation department had failed to submit.
They still stress on the point of building proper embankments. Less corruption, transparency, central intervention can be the way out of this problem. Otherwise, a major part of the human habitation will go down the river very soon leaving lakhs of people homeless.