Many people in the country are gripped by the destruction caused by floods in the Kosi river of Bihar, leading to vicious misery and displacement of nearly two-and-half million people there. However, floods are common and intrinsic to the Bihar economy. The Kosi is particularly known for this problem, and is already popular as the 'sorrow of Bihar'. This river originates in Nepal, and flows through a length of 724 kilometres before merging with the Ganga within Bihar. However, it has laterally shifted its course by more than 120 kilometres within the last two centuries, and routinely bursts past its existing channels. The Kosi barrage, also known as the Bhimnagar barrage, at Kusaha (just across the border in Nepal), is the key river-management structure, meant to control the Kosi river. For long, it has been known to be hopelessly inadequate and in a state of disrepair. Other rivers in the state exhibit the same problems, though to a smaller extent. The upshot is that a great deal of Bihar is flood-prone. Each of the 38 districts of Bihar has a living memory of floods, with 2A of these having been repeatedly flooded during the current decade. In the eight years of the current decade, 2005 and 2006 have been the only years in which the 18 'northern districts' of the state have not been ravaged by widespread floods in various rivers entering the state from Nepal. "Floods are a natural problem of Bihar; but what are we to do?" asks an mp belonging to that state, whose party is part of the ruling upa coalition at the Centre. On the other hand, the rising incidence and scale of floods in Bihar can also be understood as a natural outcome of economic processes at the core of Bihar's developmental history in recent decades. One key element of this tale is the fact that Bihar has almost totally missed out on the development of the secondary and the tertiary sectors of the economy in the decades since independence. This has made Bihar's economy all the more dependent on agriculture, and increased its population's economic pressure on its land resources. The effect has been all the more exacerbated after the state of Jhark-hand was carved out of Bihar in 2000. Even in a situation where industrialisation and a growth of modern economy was stunted overall, the latter state ended up with all the industrial assets of pre-division Bihar; as well as nearly all its mineral resources. This has led to a situation where only 12 per cent of present Bihar's gdp comes from the industrial sector, the smallest industrial base for any state in the country. It has a low value services sector that accounts for the state gdp. The remaining 40 per cent comes from agriculture and allied activities that provide a tattered life-line to 80 per cent of its population. Key outcomes This situation has had two key outcomes for the government and people of Bihar. First, the government is severely handicapped for funds and monies that could be invested for upgrading the quality and productivity of its human resources and infrastructure, as well as its manufacturing and services sectors. This handicap manifests in the abysmal quality of Bihar's hospitals and schools, roads and bridges, electrification and sanitation programmes, and irrigation and flood management projects (including barrages). Bihar's disadvantage is even more explicit in public finance data. Mohan Guruswamy, an independent economist with a somewhat maverick reputation, points out that Bihar's 'per capita development expenditure' during the period 2000-02 was Rs3,206 per annum. In comparison, the all India figure on this count was almost double at Rs6,748.50. This, in turn, created an equally poor record in sectors which are regarded as thrust areas for any state government in the country. The national average for annual per capita public expenditure on roads is Rsl 17.80; for Bihar it is Rs44.60. The national per capita expenditure for public health services is Rsl57.20; for Bihar, it is less by almost a half at Rs86.20. And yes, Bihar spends Rsl04.20 per capita per year on irrigation and flood control, compared to the national figure of Rsl99.20. The more important point made by Guruswamy is that Bihar also suffers from apparent financial discrimination by the country's financial systems. It receives less Central financial assistance than several states with smaller populations. Thus, Andhra Pradesh, with a population of 74 million, received Central financial assistance worth Rs6,902.20, on a per capita per year basis during the period studied by Guruswamy. The comparable figure for Bihar, with a population of over 90 million, was just Rs2,849.60. Even more starkly, the state received around Rs551.60 per capita per year by way of credit from public financial institutions during the same period, compared to the national average of Rs4,828.80. The government's inability to invest in development has also led to a situation where Bihar ranks at the bottom of the states on almost every indicator of economic and human development. This is borne by Bihar's ranking in terms of the Human Development Index surveys commissioned by the Planning Commission. While the overall country has 27.5 per cent of its people living below the 'poverty line', the figure for Bihar is 43.2 per cent. The second outcome of the trajectory of recent economic development is that the bulk of the state's population has no economic alternative to staying engaged in agriculture; and, that too, barely at subsistence levels, with productivity far below the national levels. One indicator of this is that Bihar has the highest percentage for landless agriculture labour in the country. The national figure is 26.5 per cent, while that reported for Bihar is 48 per cent. This has happened even as Bihar's population has increased at 2.84 per cent per year during the past two decades, much faster than the national average of 2.13 per cent. The combination of an increased population, as well as the bulk of it staying in low-grade agriculture has had direct implications for Bihar's river eco-systems. In the past, even up to the 1970s, floods in Bihar's rivers -including the Kosi - were truly accepted as annual natural phenomena. Indeed, the official and commonplace understanding was that these were mechanisms by which rivers deposited silt on agricultural lands beyond their banks; and thereby replenished the fertility of these areas. Indeed, Bihari folklore was full of customs and rites welcoming floods. That point of view was dumped in later decades. More dependent Bihar's economy, and increasing numbers of its people, became more dependent on directly working the land. The only option in this situation was to work the state's land resources all the more. The traditional insight into the 'silt-fertilisation' effect of the state's rivers was replaced by an imperative to create strategies and mechanisms that would allow available land to be cultivated around the year. Thus, newer generations of cultivators as well as successive governments in Bihar have tried to keep floods back by 'bunding' or channel-lising the rivers between high embankments. This has been increasingly Bihar's flood control strategy over the decades. In 1952, Bihar had 160 kilometres of embankments. Today, it has nearly 3,500 kilometres of river stretches bound by embankments. These embankments have changed the dynamics of annual floods in the state. Previously, Bihar had relatively shallow river beds where stones, boulders, and gravel were released soon after the waters entered the state from Nepal. Now, the embankments have become channels where stones, boulders, and gravel from upstream river beds in Nepal are carried down and deposited for the length of Bihar's rivers. The result is that even normal river levels within the embankments are far higher than the agricultural zones, because the river beds within the embankment have kept rising. "In the past, the flood waters would spread as a comparably slow invasion that would retract after a couple of months. Now, the waters rush out as headwaters from a dam, and are unable to go back over the embankments. So, they have no option to spread out or create long-term waterlogging", explains Dinesh Mishra, a 62-year-old iiT-trained engineer, who is convener of the Barh Mukti Abhiyan or 'Freedom From Floods Campaign'. Moreover, given the constrained capacity of the state government to invest in de-silting and clearing these channels has made the problem more complex and unmanageable. Each year, the stress and the strain on the embankments have accentuated, with an unwavering acceleration in the number of breaches reported. A corollary aspect of this is the steady increase in the state's flood-prone areas, even as the state expenditure on embankments has increased markedly as a percentage of its annual budget. The flood-prone areas of Bihar have increased from 25 lakh hectares in 1960 to 68.8 lakh hectares at the beginning of the current decade. Some analysts advance the argument that Bihar's flood problems could be fixed by building dams in Nepal. Successive governments in Nepal have been less than enthusiastic to the idea; and the current one even more so. In any case, a dam takes a long time to build, and several of them would be required for Bihar's rivers. Realistic and sustainable solutions for handling floods have to be intrinsic to Bihar's economy. Until then, it is accursed to be hit by floods year after year.