Engineered chaos
september 5, 1984. Ganga Prasad Yadav, a farmer living in Teghara village in Saharsa district in north Bihar, will not forget the date in a hurry. "It had been raining incessantly for over a week. The water level of the Kosi river had been rising continuously. Then the eastern Kosi embankment breached near Hempur village,' he recalls. In one sweep, the surging flood waters submerged nearly a dozen villages. In a few hours, the river had completely obliterated his village. "I was saved by my father who carried me on his shoulders, wading through the gushing water to the higher reaches,' he says. They were the lucky ones. Nearly 200 fellow villagers drowned in the floods.
The Kosi means kosna or curse in Hindi. And true to its meaning, it devastates anything that comes in its way, from the Himalayan range in Nepal