Dateline ACT

India 06/05

February 1, 2005

Along the Brahmaputra River, Indians learn to cope with worsening annual floods

By Paul Jeffrey, ACT International

Guwahati, India, February 1, 2005--Unlike Indians in coastal communities who faced an unexpected wave of water when the tsunami struck on December 26, people who live in India's northeast along the Brahmaputra River are accustomed to floods.

For centuries, the mighty river has flooded every year, blessing farmers' fields with fertility in its rush from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. Yet environmental changes are turning that blessing into a curse. The once gentle flood waters have steadily risen higher and higher and with increasing frequency sweep away lives and livelihoods. Yet with help from Action by Churches Together (ACT) International, a global alliance of churches and related agencies, people who live along the Brahmaputra are learning how to live with the massive floods.

"We can't stop disasters from happening, but by organizing together, we can reduce our losses. We can fight with the disaster," said Jotjewti, a woman in the village of Dhararghat, where mostly illiterate women have taken a lead in organizing a disaster-management team with help from ACT.

"The floods used to be good for us, good for our fields, but now they just destroy. They don't do us any good any more," said Basanti Malakar, a 70-year-old resident of Borchung, an indigenous village near the river. Rather than fertile topsoil, she said that in recent years the Brahmaputra has left behind more and more silt, and she is getting one-quarter less rice from her fields as a result.

Last year's floods forced Malakar to build a raised platform where she and her family crowded together for more than a month. Most of her neighbors moved onto a raised highway bridge five kilometers away. The village's homes all flooded. Malakar said they built boats of banana leaves to ferry fodder to their animals, herded onto a raised roadway seven kilometers away. She said they were lucky; they lost only one cow to the floods.

Throughout the northeast of India, thousands were killed by flooding last year, and hundreds of thousands left homeless.

Last year's floods were the highest in history, and they seem to presage more disaster ahead. Indiscriminate logging upstream in Chinese-controlled Tibet has decreased the ability of steep mountainsides to hold back the water from heavy monsoon rains. In India, population pressures have pushed farmers to shorten the slash-and-burn cycle. According to Prabipta Changkakati, an engineer with the water-resources agency for the state of Assam, in the mid-20th century, rural farmers cut the jungle down to plant crops every 18 years; today the cycle has been shortened to just three years, and the denuded hills that rise above the Brahmaputra simply cannot hold onto the rains when they come. The resulting increased sediment charge has left the river choking on silt and has steadily raised the riverbed. In places, the riverbed is higher than the surrounding landscape, and the river is held in check only by artificial levees, the efficacy of which has been hotly debated for decades.

Several dams have been built on tributaries of the Brahmaputra, yet critics say they seem to have added to the problem, despite promises that they would help control flooding. When heavy rains fell on Assam in October, a dam on a major tributary of the Brahmaputra opened its floodgates, sending a wall of water crashing into the valley below. "Their primary concern was to save the dam, not the lives and property of the people," said A.K. Goldsmith, the regional emergency services director for the Church's Auxiliary for Social Action (CASA), a member of ACT.

With years of experience in helping victims of cyclones and floods, CASA sprung into action during last year's floods, which peaked in July, August, and October. Malakar's family was one of 2,250 families along the river that received emergency food from CASA in August. Within weeks, CASA utilized funding from ACT to provide a more substantial "family pack" of 17 items - food, clothing, first aid supplies, and a tarp for shelter - to 15,000 affected families. Goldsmith said members of churches in unaffected areas provided much of the labor to package the items and help distribute them to needy families, at times using four-wheel-drive vehicles to reach remote areas, other times having to utilize boats.

Another ACT member working in Assam also responded quickly to the damage wrought by the rising water, distributing food and other emergency supplies in villages along the swollen river. Lutheran World Service India (LWSI) sent aid to villages like Tukura Partguan, where in October water from a tributary of the Brahmaputra rose so fast over their family's home that Mahmod Salam Molik and his wife Kanchanmala had to pull their seven children from their home and push them into the branches of a nearby tree, where they clung for two days. The cold wind and water was too much for their 12-year-old daughter Rehena and their 8-year-old son Mokibul, and after several hours the two children fell into the water and drowned. They were but two of the 119 who died in the village of 350 families.

When the waters receded, LWSI began providing food while the villagers rebuilt their homes and moved tons of earth - one basketful at a time - to raise a levee two meters higher. Throughout the region, residents are moving earth on a massive scale, creating ponds from which they will harvest fish, using the dirt to build raised platforms on which they can survive the next round of flooding.

With funding from a joint appeal issued by ACT (ASIN43 – Emergency Relief to Flood-affected), LWSI is building more than 18 raised earthen platforms. CASA is constructing at least six concrete platforms, where reinforced stilts will raise the floor two meters above the highest water levels of 2004. Using knowledge gained from building similar structures in the cyclone-ravaged Indian state of Orissa, CASA's platforms will be able to withstand 300 km/hour winds.

Yet CASA and LWSI are placing most of their emphasis on helping residents organize to resist future flooding. Both ACT members are helping to organize local committees charged with mitigating the effects of the next round of flooding.

"Relief assistance alone cannot solve people's problems. If they lose 100 rupees, at best we can help put back five rupees. Relief is not a substitution for organizing to save lives and livelihoods," said Sushil Saha, the LWSI project coordinator in Assam.

"Self-help groups allow communities to extend their coping mechanisms. They're planning before the next disaster how they're going to respond. We support them with training and some equipment. They have experience with flooding, they have ideas, but the floods are getting worse, so we're helping them prepare to deal with that reality, and deal with it in an organized way," Saha said.

The 100 LWSI-sponsored committees, each with more than two dozen members, are organized into task forces focusing on issues such as early warning/search and rescue, shelter/water/sanitation/carcass disposal, health and counseling, coordination and networking, rehabilitation, and peacebuilding.

Both LWSI and CASA push for half the committee members to be women. In some cases, it is the first opportunity for women to participate in organized groups. This is important, relief workers insist. "Women are supposed to prepare the food, but how do they do that when it's wet? They're supposed to keep the children quiet, but that's hard to do when the family is confined to a small space in a refuge. And when they come back to their house, it's damp and smelly and the kids get sick, and it's the women who care for them," reports LWSI project officer Sangita Adhikari.

Giving women a space to organize has encouraged the local committees to confront other crises. LWSI staff worked with committee members to do role plays about gender issues to mark the International Day Against Violence Against Women.

The CASA-sponsored committees are composed of 10 young people from each community, equipped with a basic kit of rescue and first aid equipment, life jackets, and a siren. The participants are chosen by the community, trained by CASA, and work in coordination with government agencies and other groups.

"What we're doing is a model. The government is often surprised that with so few resources we can do so much, but that's possible when there's adequate training and an emphasis on accountability, and when the whole community participates fully in the process of relief and rehabilitation," said Goldsmith.