Click to play videoMahinder Ram’s village was submerged when the River Kosi flooded half of Bihar. Ram and 60 people, mostly women and children, escaped in two boats but Kosi hasn’t spared them yet. For 12 days, Mahinder has helped the group to survive on a raised concrete platform.
The floods have affected over 3.3 lakh hectares of farmland in Bihar. Shravan's Kumar cornfields in Bhasti village are waterlogged, his crop almost completely destroyed. Kumar earned over Rs 60,000 from his fields last year. This time, he'll be lucky to get anything.
“There is no hope for growing any crop this year. I don’t even know if I will get enough to eat,” says Shravan. The floods even washed away the sacks of corn kept in the courtyard. For 11 days, Shravan and his family lived on the roof of their house, guarding the one sack that escaped the water.
At an abandoned train compartment in the Madhepura railway station, Vinod Paswan and his family are waiting for the floodwaters to recede so that they can return to their home. The water is still over six feet high and all Vinod can do little is wait and hope.
But not everyone is waiting. Dilshad and his mother Jaleesa Khatoon are on their way from Supaul to their house in Gosaitola village. They don't know what they'll find when they get there, but they are willing to take their chances.
“We don’t have enough to eat and we can’t wait to die of hunger,” says Jaleesa.
With the waters receding gradually, many people are risking their lives to go back to their homes or what remains of them. But experts say the dip is temporary, and warn against such movements. They say people may get trapped again when the monsoon returns in the last week of September.
“Till mid-October it is a dangerous period. People should wait for it to be over,” says H C Sirohi, Divisional Commissioner, Saharsa.
“All farmlands would have accumulated sand and even if people go back now how far they will able to do farming is a question,” says S C Jha, chairperson of the Special Task Force on Bihar.
Away from flooded homes, hectic calculations are being made about the total monetary loss the Kosi has caused. The Supaul branch manager of the Life Insurance Corporation is figuring out the claims he expects to get this year. His estimate: over Rs 30 lakh.
"All we need is a death certificate. With that we will pay compensation," says Subhashish Chatterjee, branch manager of the Life Insurance Corporation in Supaul.
The flood is also likely to lead to more migration to cities. In a Dalit village, Garib Chand Mahto used to work as a daily wage labourer in other farmers' fields. With the fields destroyed and his hut submerged, Mahto knows that going to the city may now be the only way out.
“If I don’t go to the city how would I survive? There is no work left in the village,” he says.
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