Bihar floods sit on 4.9 million people across 15 districts

Bihar's Disaster Management Department counted about 4.936 million people under flood water on Monday, across 15 districts. Heavy rain in the state and in Nepal's catchments has kept rivers above their danger marks after a week in which some Ganga gauges had already broken their own records.

The districts on the list are Patna, Bhojpur, Saran, Vaishali, Bhagalpur, Begusarai, Buxar, Samastipur, Munger, Katihar, Lakhisarai, Khagaria, Purnea, Madhepura and Araria. Sunday's bulletin had put the figure near 4.87 million in 575 gram panchayats and 88 blocks. Monday's count moved the other way.

The weather office said Bihar has had 111.7 mm of rain so far in September, about 13 percent above normal. That is not an extreme seasonal total. The flood is a junction flood. Several tributaries rose together while the Ganga was already high, so water backed up at the confluences around Patna and then travelled east.

The gauges

At 6 am on Monday the Ganga at Sultanganj in Bhagalpur stood at 36.21 metres, 1.71 metres above the danger level. The same river was above danger at Digha, Gandhi Ghat, Hathidah, Bhagalpur, Kahalgaon and Munger. The Kosi was above the mark at Baltara and Kursela. The Budhi Gandak was high at Khagaria, the Punpun at Sripalpur, the Bagmati at Benibad, the Ghaghara at Darauli.

Earlier this month Gandhi Ghat in Patna reached 50.57 metres, five centimetres above the 21 August 2016 record. Pandarak and Sultanganj also went through their previous highest flood levels in the same window. Those three simultaneous record breaches are what turned a normal late-monsoon rise into a statewide emergency.

The Gandak barrage at Valmiki Nagar discharged 90,600 cusecs at 10 am on Monday, with the trend still up. The Kosi barrage at Birpur discharged 1,51,015 cusecs. That is below this year's peak of 2,55,425 cusecs on 20 July, but it is still a large volume entering north Bihar.

What the state is running

Officials said 1,260 community kitchens were open on Monday. Thirteen relief camps were housing about 11,060 people with food, beds and medical cover. Sunday's camp population had been listed at about 12,260. NDRF and SDRF teams are on the ground. Crematoriums in Bhagalpur and Begusarai have been reported under water in local accounts, which is a grim measure of how far the river has come into the towns.

Most of the 4.9 million people counted as affected are not in those 13 camps. They are in villages where the kitchen is a tarpaulin and the road is a boat. The official machinery is feeding a fraction of the list.

Why the water is slow to leave

Even when individual gauges fall, the Ganga downstream is still full. Water that dropped at Allahabad, Varanasi and Buxar is the same water that arrives later at Munger and Bhagalpur. Nepal rain keeps the Kosi and Gandak supplied. Embankments that held in July can leak in September after weeks of load.

Bihar floods on this scale are not a surprise. The numbers on Monday are a reminder that a 13 percent surplus in monthly rain is enough, when the junctions coincide, to put nearly five million people inside the river's new edge. The next useful bulletin is not the kitchen count. It is whether Sultanganj, Baltara and Khagaria fall together. Until they do, the 15-district list stays open.