[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 mobile phones, computers, social media and other technology, millions of people in both rural and urban areas had no idea that dangerous weather was coming. Even some government officials said they had been given no warning.]
By Suhasini Raj and Jeffrey Gettleman
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A
rescue boat carried people from a flooded village in Motihari, in the Indian
state
of
Bihar, last month. Credit Cathal Mcnaughton/Reuters
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MURMALA, India — As the floodwaters sloshed
into her hut, Phoolvati, a poor and landless woman living in a farming village
in Bihar State, scrambled to grab some jewelry, a soccer ball and a wad of
rupees — the last of the family’s meager treasure. She hurriedly stuffed it all
into a big aluminum box.
Men from the village were rowing a small boat
as fast as they could, to get people out before they drowned.
“Take this,” she told her 10-year-old
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. The boat pushed off, nearly disappearing behind a wall of
rain.
Northern India, one of the country’s poorest
regions, has been ravaged by some of the worst monsoon storms in recent years.
Local officials pointed to a highway overpass about 15 feet 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.
Sadly, this happens every year. Deadly
flooding is part of the landscape in South Asia, and over the past two decades
an average of around 2,000 people have died 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 mobile phones,
computers, social media and other technology, millions of people in both rural
and urban areas had no idea that dangerous weather was coming. Even some
government officials said they had been given no warning.
Walking through a string of villages in
Bihar, the state that was worst hit this past month, the reek of fermenting
grain cuts through the moist air. Sacks of rice from government warehouses had
been left outside during the storms. Now inedible, the rice is full of dead
worms.
Hundreds of thousands of displaced people now
need that food. Across this area, more than 20,000 homes have been destroyed.
Here in the village of Murmala, in a fertile
farming area about an hour and half’s drive from the nearest town, 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
livings 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, in many instances, 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.
Phoolvati, a gaunt woman with dark hair who
estimates that she is around 50, remembers scanning the rich green rice paddies
that surround her village in mid-August and smiling at her husband.
There is a lot of work out there, she told
him. Soon we will have enough money to buy our daughter a bicycle. They
believed the worst of the monsoon had passed.
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.”
Afsari, a mother of four, rushed out of her
hut with her children to look for help. All of them were knocked down by the
current. She tried to hold the hand of her youngest child, who was 2. Her grip
slipped and her son was washed away.
Her neighbor Mohammad Nayyar Alam is still
furious, saying that the one government boat that finally showed up was
“useless.” The boat had space for seven people, he said, but five of the seats
were taken by government officials.
“How can it help the 400 families struggling
to keep their heads above water then?” he asked.
Afsari spoke in near whispers outside her
mildewed hut. She said she planned to use the $6,200 from her son’s death to
educate her three surviving children.
“I want them to get out of this village,” she
said, an empty look in her eyes.
Weather models predict that over the next 30
years India will experience more extreme rainfall.
Asit K. 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 criticized
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.
One older man limped around with a huge
leaking boil on the inside of his thigh. He said he had been wading through
waist-deep floodwater, filthy with garbage, for three days in an attempt to
find his son. Eventually, he found him: The boy’s body had washed up a couple
of kilometers away.
Phoolvati is still haunted by the image of
her daughter, Bahomani, clutching the aluminum box with the family’s valuables
as the rickety 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.
“I shouted. I was paralyzed,” she remembered.
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.
Suhasini Raj reported from Murmala, and
Jeffrey Gettleman from New Delhi. Ayesha Venkataraman contributed reporting
from Mumbai.