The year 2008, witnessed yet another disastrous flood in North Bihar. While the blame game between the politicians becomes evident as the issue is played out in the public domain, this verbal war is not a surprise to many. Floods in Bihar have been an annual phenomenon. Though the floods have been regularly keeping their promise of revisiting North Bihar every year, what has failed to keep pace is the government's response towards mitigation and control strategies for effective flood management. According to the Flood Management Information System, in Bihar, 76 per cent of the population in North Bihar lives under the recurrent threat of floods. Due to this perennial nature of floods, embankments have been weakened and breached continuously, with annual floods taking a toll of lives, crops and public property. The peculiar nature of the rivers like Kosi, Gandak, Burhi Gandak, Bagmati, Kamla Balan, Mahananda and Adhwara group of rivers flowing from Nepal, is the very high sediment load the rivers bring with them, a fact which also explains the wayward rise of Kosi.

Latest estimates of the loss caused due to floods say almost 1,000 villages have been submerged while the death toll keeps rising. While millions have been uprooted and displaced, what is also being reported from many places is the scramble over scarce resources, as food riots have broken out in many places in Bihar. Figures reveal that crops worth over Rs.1.5 billion have been damaged and destroyed. Important pointers should be drawn from this tragedy at the national and bilateral level, including the need to delineate preventive measures at the national level and to exercise effective diplomacy with Nepal at the bilateral level.

At the national level, the Kosi havoc reminds the politicians and decision-makers to revisit their politics and policies and also underscores the need to understand the convergence of security and development needs of the people in the 21st century. How decisions made by the top echelons of the society can have an adverse consequential impact on the lives and livelihood of the people is what needs to be groped with. The Centre -State dynamics which is always estranged due to the lack of available funds and the lack of coordination complemented by the role of opposition parties in Bihar in politicizing the issue for parochial vested interests is perhaps the primary reason for diverting the real solutions from the issue. Lack of effective governance and administrative glitches infused with corruption, which has become an inevitable culture of Bihar irrespective of the parties in power is however not accounted for. Responsibility for appropriate and timely maintenance and regular coordination between the center and the state on a sustained basis needs to be worked upon.

At the bilateral level, in order to control the tide of Kosi, the Governments of India and Nepal conceptualized the Kosi Agreement on 1954. The project envisaged the construction of a barrage and the provision of irrigation and power benefits to both countries. Overall the estimated plan was to set up a multi-purpose dam within Nepal to provide both flood control, irrigation and power benefits to the countries. Consequently the Kosi barrage was built in 1964 and was supposed to contain 930,000 cusecs of water so that the plains of Bihar are not flooded. However, as one would go by the record flow this year any such attempt has failed. While reports suggest that engineers from Bihar had gone to Nepal before the catastrophe but were prevented from entering, Nepal seems to be shirking all the responsibility to the vicissitudes of politics. This is a sharp pointer of the need to maintain good relations with neighbours. As Nepal is on the threshold of embarking on a 'new' relationship with India, and has long accused India of its 'big brother attitude.' Nepal and India have of late been facing pressures for revisiting the decade old bilateral relationship - Nepalese Prime Minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, on 20 August 2008, called the Kosi Agreement with India, "a suicidical agreement." There is a majoritarian view in Nepal which states that hydropower should not be exported to India, because most of the agreements overwhelmingly favour India. For India cooperation with Nepal is the only working solution. A looming shadow of mistrust and suspicion can jeopardize it.

As far as the upsurge of the Kosi is concerned, a major reason for its rise has been the huge quantity of sediments it brings with it. Predictions have been made that embankments would be ineffective in the long run as the Kosi would definitely rise due to further sediment accumulation. To counter this problem, the provision of storage tanks is the only solution to the Kosi flood problem. However in order to operationalize this, cooperation from Nepal is indispensable. Both the countries should understand that cooperation on issues of common concern can cement trust and enable both the countries to offer a more secure life for their citizens.