The Bagmati loses its way in Kathmandu amid political vacuum and urban chaos. The chaos and urban sprawl of today’s Kathmandu have taken a serious toll on the stretch of the Bagmati and its tributaries that meet in the city. In the absence of clear guidelines regulating river water use and diversion, the city extracts some 30 million litres of water each day from this seasonal river to quench its thirst, even in the dry season.
For more than two decades, Huta Ram Baidya has led the Save Bagmati River campaign. An affable, octogenarian activist and Nepal’s first agricultural engineer, his views have been widely circulated in the country’s regional language press, radio, television and on websites. He tells Aditya Batra that the river’s extreme degradation bears testament to extreme cultural and environmental loss in the Kathmandu valley.
More than 70,000 families are facing the wrath of the turbulent Ganga in Bihar's Bhagalpur district.
On Sunday afternoon, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who conducted an aerial survey of the areas ravaged by the river, however, told journalists here that “flood waters were receding” and that no major embankment had been breached.
A high court order has not deterred a distillery in Sitamarhi district of Bihar from discharging effluents into the Bagmati. On January 27, the Patna High Court had ordered the Bihar State Pollution Control Board (spcb) and the Central Pollution Control Board (cpcb) to check pollution from Righa Sugar Company distillery and take appropriate action.
With major rivers in spate, there is no let-up in the overall flood situation in Bihar where 1.5 million people continue to reel under the deluge in 11 north Bihar districts.
Rivers like Kosi, Mahananda, Bagmati, Kamala Balan and Adhwara have crossed the danger level at different places along their course, Central Water Commission sources said.
Probe may put Buta Singh in a fix on august 1, when the Bagmati river breached its sand embankment in Sitamarhi district, Bihar, it brought unforeseen trouble for the state
PATNA: The riparian imbroglio in North Bihar which began on Saturday morning with the Bagmati breaching its embankment at Tilak Tajpur, affecting more than one lakh people, has prompted some pertinent questions to be asked of the Nitish Kumar Government.
ANAND S.T. DAS
PATNA While the flood situation in north Bihar eased with water levels in some rivers falling down the danger marks, there were fresh worries on Wednesday from continuous erosions of embankments at several places and a new breach seen in the Bagmati's embankment.
ANAND S.T. DAS
Aug. 4: Reeling under swirling waters of swollen rivers for three days, large parts of north Bihar found some respite from the floods on Tuesday as water levels in several rivers receded. But authorities are still struggling to address the huge human distress caused by the floods.
