Central
Water Commission, India’s premier technical body under Union Ministry
of Water Resources, has once again failed in the Uttarakhand flood
disaster. Even as the Uttarakhand state faced the worst floods in its
history, CWC, which has been given the task of forecasting floods across
flood prone areas all over India, completely failed in making any
forecasts that could have helped the people and administration in
Uttarakhand.
First principle of disaster management
is prior warning. With prior warning, significant proportion of
possible damages and destruction can be avoided. In that respect, one
expected that CWC would play a key role in forecasting the floods.
SANDRP has been monitoring CWC flood forecasts throughout the monsoon
for some years. During June 15-17, when Uttarakhand was receiving the
most intense rains, CWC did not make any forecasts regarding
Uttarakhand. As far as the most severely disaster affected areas of
Ganga basin upstream of Devprayag are concerned (these include the
worst affected Kedarnath and Mandakini valley, the Gangotri and
Bhagirathi valley and Badrinath in Alaknanda valley), CWC has made no
flood forecasts at all this year. Same is the case regarding other
affected regions of Uttarakhand including Yamuna basin including
Yamunotri and Pithoragarh including Goriganga basin. What is than the
role of this premier technical body tasked with flood forecasting?
The only forecast that CWC made for
Uttarakhand this June 2013 were for Rishikesh and Haridwar on June 18,
2013. Even in these instances, CWC’s callousness is reflected. For
example, by the fact that normally when flood forecasts are made for any
site in the first place, the forecasts would be low flood forecast
(where water level is between warning and danger level for the site),
and only in next stage, would medium flood forecast would be made (water
level above danger level). However, in case of both Rishikesh and
Haridwar, CWC straightaway made medium flood forecasts, clearly missing
the low flood forecasts.
In fact looking at the CWC flood forecasting site (http://www.india-water.com/
The callous performance of CWC does
not end there. During June 2-7 this year, CWC flood forecasting site as
also the flood forecasting site of NDMA which also depends on CWC,
stopped functioning. After numerous emails and phone calls from SANDRP,
the website started functioning on June 7, 2013 and Shri V D Roy,
Director (Flood Forecasting Management) of CWC wrote to us, “Due to
technical reasons, the CWC FF site was not working since 2nd June. With
consistent effort, the website was made functional w e f 7th June”.
Pointing out a major blunder of CWC, we had written to CWC on June 12,
2013, “CWC forecast site reported that water level of Brahmaputra river
at Neamatighat site in Jorhat district in Assam had reached 94.21 m at
0900 hrs, which was 6.84 m above the highest flood level of the site at
87.37 m. The FF site also forecast that the level will be 94.15 m at
0900 am on June 12, 2013, that is today. Both the recording and forecast
were clearly wrong, rather way off the mark. The site or the area in
question or upstream and down stream levels do not match with what
the CWC site said y'day.” Needless to add there was no floods in
Brahmaputra in spite of such forecast by India’s highest technical body!
CWC is yet to respond to our emails on this issue.
It is strange that CWC, in stead of
putting its house in order, is acting as a lobby for big dams by making
baseless claims about Tehri dam having saved downstream area of floods,
as reported by Indian Express[i] on
June 25, 2013. This is like adding salt to the wounds of the people of
Uttarakhand who are suffering from the ill effects of lopsided
developments including dams and hydropower projects. It would be better
if CWC tries to improve its flood forecasts rather than indulging in
such lobbying efforts at such times of crisis.
Himanshu Thakkar (ht.sandrp@gmail.com, 09968242798)
South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers & People (http://sandrp.in/)
For SANDRP blogs on Uttarakhand flood disaster, see:
[i] http://www.indianexpress.
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