Bangla river project to cause more floods

GUWAHATI, July 17: The Jamuna Multipurpose Bridge Project (JMBP) in Bangladesh will ultimately lead to devastating flood and severe erosion in the Brahmaputra valley of Assam, warned noted geographer Manik Kar of Nowgong College. Jamuna is the name of the Bangladesh part of the Brahmaputra. A PhD in flood hazard, Kar said in his paper Flood Hazard Mitigation is an International Riddle : A Case Study of the Brahmaputra Valley (India), represented at an international conference on disaster management organised by CARE, UNDP and Dhaka University recently, that the around billion-dollar JMBP, which was proposed to regulate the Jamuna river at selected sites with flood protection funds and a bridge (Bangabandhu Bridge), has reduced the width of the river at the bridge site from 10 km to 5 km. As the slope of the Brahmaputra between Goalpara and Dhubri (1:14650) is little different from that of between Dhubri and Sirajganj, the barrage on the Jamuna will help aggradation in the Jamuna and thus produce devastating flood and severe erosion in the Brahmaputra valley, Kar said. The Brahmaputra and its tributaries are the major agents of floods in Assam. As for the river Brahmaputra, Kar said, it is an international river with a length of 2,897 km with its upper course Tsangpo (1,625 km, i.e. 56.10 per cent of its length) lying in Tibetan China, the middle part Brahmaputra (918 km, 31.70 per cent) flowing through Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. The river is most sensitive in the sense that it is in a seismic zone having a very narrow geographic set-up and a mobile mountain zone. Landslide is intense and the river has a very gentle slope (on an average 1:6990) in the valley where the density of population is high and the human interference is also extensive. The management of the Brahmaputra valley floods is very hard without proper management of the 56.10 per cent of the river in China and 12.20 per cent in Bangladesh, Kar said. Though dredging in the Jamuna might have proved fruitful for both Bangladesh and India it has so far not been done, he said, adding, dredging is possible in the Jamuna, while it is not possible in the Brahmaputra. As a result of absence of any dredging in the Jamuna, the river has lost its carrying capacity and aggravated the problem of floods in both the countries, he said. He also warned that construction of dams and other such devices to regulate the river in its upper catchment and its tributaries either in Arunachal or in China may result in catastrophe for Assam. Rather, he suggested that it will be wiser if China, India and Bangladesh sit together and evolve better management processes for the river. A single country is helpless in managing the river, he said. Kar also presented a paper on the role of women in flood hazard and epidemic mitigation, jointly with M Banu, in the conference. In this paper, Kar and his research scholar Banu laid stress on global efforts for flood hazard and epidemic mitigation.