A tiny solar panel for electricity outside an ordinary farmer’s hut in the tree-filled village of Shihpur in Bihar’s northern Supaul district, and the sight of bullocks and paddy fields around may appear to be signs of thriving rural life. But in reality, the sinking of this island village inside the wild waters of the Kosi is now only a matter of time.
Like some 48 neighbouring villages that were once greener and livelier with social life, Shihpur and a few remaining island hamlets are in constant danger of getting wiped away forever by the mighty Himalayan river’s rising waters. The accelerating construction of a road bridge — part of the ambitious East-West Corridor on NH-57 — and a parallel rail bridge across the Kosi at Nirmali has already led to the waters swallowing dozens of villages and displacing over 60,000 villagers last year.
The two bridges are being built by the NHAI and the Railways in alleged disregard of river engineering norms and the displaced villagers’ protests as the new structures have forcibly squeezed the unpredictable Kosi’s expansive local width of 12 km into just 1.8 km at this highly populated region. While the villagers had been living inside the Kosi’s path for decades with little difficulty despite the river frequently changing its course, the release of water from the Kosi barrage much less than the average flow proved the safety claims of the NHAI and the Railways wrong last year as many villages drowned into oblivion.
“This old village feels so alien now; the government has turned it into our future graveyard in the water,” said Manulal Sardar, a lower-caste farmer who is the sole owner of a solar panel here, to this newspaper. Most other villagers agreed in visible despondence, knowing their common fate well enough.
But the two bridges, whose foundation stones were laid by then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and then railway minister Nitish Kumar in June 2003, are currently at the centre of a massive local public movement seeking to increase the bridges’ length to at least 10 km so as to ensure life in about 380 villages both upstream and downstream. In 2004, a team of engineering experts formed by Bihar’s RJD government had said the bridges would drown the villages, but the current state government gave it clearance soon after assuming power in 2005.
“We demand that the bridges’ construction be immediately stopped and the project be reviewed in the interest of thousands of displaced villagers and thousands of acres of fertile three-crop land. We will move the courts as the governments have been too callous so far,” said Satyanarayan Prasad, a leader of the displaced villagers’ movement.