Way back in September, 2008 the company I worked for in Delhi
sent me to an official trip to the London office in UK. Unfortunately I got
cautioned by the metropolitan police, just a day after landing, for carrying a
pen-knife in my bag to a public place (the Big Ben). At the police station I
was asked to produce my passport. On questioning I told them that I hailed from
Assam in India. It is then that one of my interrogators commented “The place from
where the tea comes from and also famous for the rhinos”. On the verge of tears
I added “And oil too”.
Those tears of mine dried up as I was dropped at the
apartment in Pimlico by the two police personnel late at night with a “Enjoy
your stay in London” but today while watching one of the local news channels
(which I rarely do) highlighting the floods inside the national park, brought
back fresh flood of tears.
Wild animals still alive
swept away along with the current, rhino calves separated from its mother,
dhekia-potia bagh (wild feline) floating and struggling between life and death,
deer taking shelter and other wild beats escaping the inundated areas and fleeing
towards the national highway- 37 and the embankments, rhino calf barging inside
the bamboo-fenced compound of a house-hold in the fringe village, animal
carcass floating in the river-water, were a few clippings which were enough to
kindle moisture in the eyes of this animal lover. The not so fortunate ones of
God’s own creations met with a watery grave. Needless to say, poachers lurking around
may find the easiest catch.
Kaziranga situated in the floodplains of the mighty river
Brahmaputra encompasses the districts of Golaghat and Nowgaon to which Sonitpur
was also added later. A few kilometers upstream is Majuli, the largest riverine
habitable island in the world. Both Kaziranga and Majuli are the two
geographical hotspots within Assam which is facing the vagaries of flood and its
accompanying unabated natural erosion. The national park, also a world heritage
site declared by UNESCO, is the habitat of several endemic, endangered and vulnerable
species. Its rich biodiversity in terms of both flora and fauna is enriched by
the complex interaction of diverse biotic and abiotic factors including the
river water of Brahmaputra. The ecosystem in KNP is not only unique but also different
from those of other national parks within India like the Corbett NP in U’khand
etc. owing to different its physiography, climate, soil, etc. The river Brahmaputra sustains life
of the wild creatures of the park by recharging the beels (wetlands) and the natural water-holes and replenishing and
rejuvenating the complex ecosystem of KNP. The irony is that the river water of
Brahmaputra which sustains life in this national park also takes away countless
lives of wild beasts during the monsoon season.
Years ago my animal lover friend Azam Siddiqui, whom I knew
from my association with PFA, emailed me a photograph captured by the famous
photographer Rituraj Konwar wherein predators and preys alike (in KNP) were clinging
on to dear life, as each stood in the temporary make-shift elevated platform
erected by the forest department at the time of one such floods in Assam. Such
is nature’s marvel.
As a student of Geography, I learnt about the sculpturing of
the earth’s surface by the different agents of erosion viz. running-water, glacier,
sea-waves, under-ground water and wind. Its blessings are in the form of
beautiful meandering course of the river, ox-bow lakes, natural levee and flood-plain
in the middle course of a river, as is commonly seen in Assam. After the flood
water recedes, it leaves behind rich alluvial deposit which is highly fertile
for the cultivation of different crops, esp. our staple crop rice. It is
nature’s way to supplement soil nutrients derived from weathering and
transportation which enriches the soil.
Nature is the best sculptor, agreed. But at what cost? Dhemaji
is the worst flood-prone district in Assam, which gets cut-off from the rest of
the state at the time of high floods. I consider myself to be so fortunate
sitting at home (parental home), sipping my cup of evening tea as I watch the
news. Entire villages swept clean by the killer-flood, standing crops
bull-dozed by the flow, domesticated animals either swept away or have to be
carried to safer areas by their owners from the angry-hungry river. Life is
brought to a complete standstill. People are brought down to the roads, reduced
to beggars (often seen begging in Guwahati), with nothing to eat, no other clothes
to wear, no home to go to because the flood water either submerged it or swept
it all. Everything wiped clean when it came surging. The tribals esp. the
Mishings have built their homes on stilted platform owing to the floods which
hits the headlines annually without fail. They have learnt to acclimatize with
the ravages of floods.
I remember my father brought home some answer scripts for
checking which was for a job opening. One of the questions was on “Floods in
Assam” (probably an essay). An examinee wrote “Assam’s flood is compulsory”. That
one liner is a dark humour. It just knocks everything down, like a glacier
mowing down whatever comes on its way.
While porcupine structures and geo-bags are erected as a
measure to check erosion and minimize the devastation caused by floods, these
are not permanent solutions. If at all floods have to be controlled the entire
catchment area must be taken into consideration which includes the states of Arunachal,
Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Manipur and Sikkim because the tributaries of
river Brahmaputra and also Barak down south in Assam either originates or flows
through these states. It is a known fact our neighbor Arunachal is damned by
the ongoing building of mega-dams to generate hydro-electricity, so much sought
after by city/ town-dwellers and the unsatiable industries to run its engines.
Pristine-virgin lands of Arunachal Himalayas have been submerged to make way
for such projects, definitely not on sustainable lines, and not in consultation
with the locales. It is pertinent to highlight here that entire northeast India
falls in the highest seismic zone (Zone V). Trees which binds the soils
together has been axed at an alarming rate, that much of Arunachal’s once
sylvan cover, can be easily detected on the satellite imageries standing bare
and exposed. With lofty mountain without the binding element, there is a
free-flow of river load further downstream. There is no denying the fact that
deforestation is also silently going on at our own backyard. We are hungry for
land. We don’t think twice before we chop-off trees in order to clear the
forest so as make way for agriculture or some other economic activity. The teeming
Indians and their ever increasing numbers is the moot cause.
A villager who was interviewed by the media broke-down in
tears having lost everything to the floods- his child, his agricultural field
with its crops, his livestock, nothing to call his own. My husband who also hailed from Dhemaji once
narrated an incident about floods. As a youth while out to provide food and clothes
the relief providers were shocked to see two dead bodies that of a mother and
her daughter, locked in a tight embrace as they drowned in the flood water.
The solution to controlling floods doesn’t lie in the
interlinking of rivers (as in Europe). Assam faces drought-like conditions in
the non-monsoon period. Aquatic life in the rivers could be jeopardized in the
name of checking floods. We cannot simply copy and paste- what is good in
Europe may not be good in India when it comes to inter-linking of rivers. How
will we check pollution of river Brahmaputra considering river Ganga and its
tributary Yamuna is far too polluted than our Brahmaputra. Why must river-water
pollution spread out to lesser polluted natural waterways?
All the governments who were in power in Assam could have
come up with a permanent solution to tame the problem of Assam’s flood. What
can we expect from a government whose leader who led the state until a few
months before stated humorously that people can use bamboo plantain bhur (raft) when such a natural calamity
strike. With a change of power, more so because the current chief minister of
Assam whose constituency is Majuli, will things improve for the better? Let’s
hope it does, fingers-crossed.
If we don’t care for our trees and our forest which is the
home of the wild animals, a day will come when our natural forest will stealthily
turn into urban concrete jungles. Will we go wild then?
-By
Karobi Gogoi
No comments:
Post a Comment