The water in his ground floor house has already covered his chairs and dining table. So Vikash Ranjan Sinha, a grocery shop owner in Madhepura, moved up to the first floor with his octogenarian parents, wife and three children, including an infant. They have been there for the past week- hoping either for the flood waters to recede or the Government to send boats to rescue them. Their food stocks are running out and the cooking gas cylinder is almost empty. Yet, despite three weeks of Bihar being inundated by floods from the overflowing Kosi river, the Government is conspicuous by its absence. And Sinha is running out of the only thing that has kept him and his family alive-hope. At the Madhepura railway station, not far from where Sinha lives, there are 100 personnel of the State Auxiliary Police (SAP), who are marooned and hungry too. The irony is that the SAP had been set up by the Bihar government to provide relief and rescue precisely when such emergencies strike the state. Yet, with no proper coordination, they, too, are holed up at the railway station waiting for rescue boats to arrive. On the streets of Madhepura, lawlessness prevails and department stores are looted even as the police looks on. For the people of Bihar, it is a double-whammy. Not only are they facing the brunt of nature's fury but they have to suffer government apathy as well. Yet, even everyday as the numbers affected mount, there is no sign that either the state or the Central Government is capable of bringing the situation under control. By last week over 2.4 million people were rendered homeless and though the Government claims that only 18 people have died, social workers and citizens believe that more than 1,000 may have died. Most families that have been rescued are huddled together in temporary shelters In Saharsa, about 30 km from Madhepura, in a relief camp set up by a social organisation, Dinesh Shah, a farm labourer, scans every new face. He still has hope that his wife and five children may be alive, though he remembers with tears that he saw them being pulled away by the floods. He swam for two days before a private boat brought him to the Saharsa camp. He doesn't have any faith in the Government's ability to bring relief. All across Bihar's affected districts, there is clear evidence that the state administration has collapsed and is unable to cope with the magnitude of the challenge it is facing. The army was finally called in after 10 days of Kosi breaching its embankments in Nepal and flooding vast swathes of Bihar. By then it was too late. Today the shortfall is enormous: There are only 257 relief camps set up, yet the demand is for 2,500-10 times. Though two lakh food packets, which have small portions of rice, lentils and jaggery, are being air-dropped or distributed by hand, the demand is for two million. Some 5,000 boats are needed for rescue, but only 1,400 are available. That has seen over 13 lakh people like Sinha marooned. "This is the worst-ever tragedy, worse than the Tsunami or Katrina and now only a global effort can help restore normalcy," says former chief minister Jagannath Mishra. Bihar's misery could have been far less but for a series of shocking failures. The Kosi river is among the most volatile in the region. It has shifted course by over 110 km in the past 100 years. In doing so, it has caused endless devastation, earning for itself the sobriquet "Sorrow of Bihar". This time when heavy rains were reported in the region, in the first week of August the river had begun lashing the embankments at the Kusaha barrage at the Indo-Nepal border menacingly. The Kosi Project Chief Engineer, E. Satyanarayana, posted at Birpur, sent a series of frantic warning messages about the impending danger to project Liaison Officer Arun Kumar Singh posted in Kathmandu, asking him to initiate action. He also sent messages to his superiors in Patna. Singh was on leave and the messages went unattended. But the Irrigation Department in Patna is believed to have sent a team of its contractors to carry out repairs at the barrage a week later. It is not clear whether they were sent for routine maintenance or were reacting to Satyanarayana's messages, but they seemed to have run into trouble with the locals. The contractor then complained to the commercial counsellor of the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu. The shocking failure