RESERVOIR OF WORRIES

India has a robust dam management systém on paper, but inadequate maintenance and climate change pose serious threats

- MOHIT SHARMA

Mindo, 52, points to her rebuilt verandah, a stark reminder of the floods that damaged her house in Sultanpur Lodhi’s Mandala village last year. As she offers a charpoy and a cup of tea—the warm Punjabi welcome— she recalls how water engulfed her house, even breaching the metre-high porch. “It was a nightmare,” she says. Her son Haroon, who runs a grocery shop to supplement the income from farming, nods in agreement. “We had to borrow money to rebuild, with no help from the government,” he says. Nearby, labourer Santosh Singh, 28, is still repaying the hefty loan he took to reconstruct portions of his flooded home.

The situation is no different in Talwara, about 90km from Sultanpur Lodhi. Says Jigir Singh, a rice farmer from Tadhe Pind: “My farms, spread over 12 acres, were submerged, and the crops completely destroyed.” The 55-year-old remembers seeing such floods more than 40 years ago, indicating changes in the monsoon pattern. Thousands of villages in more than 24 districts in Punjab bore the brunt of the fury of the Sutlej and the Beas; nearly 50 people died.

While in the north, the Bhakra Nangal and the Pong dams overflowed to wreak havoc downstream, the sudden gush of water from Kerala’s Idukki dam in 2018 also pointed to, as the local people put it, a major shift in rainfall. C.J. Stephen, 48, representative of the merchants’ association in Chappath on the banks of the Periyar, says that normally, even if water was released from the Idukki Dam, it would take three hours to reach Chappath. “But that day, the Idukki collector instructed us to immediately relocate products kept in our shops,” he recalls. “We informed the shop owners, but not many took the warning seriously. By evening, water from both the rains and the dam release flooded the village. Many merchants had stocked up in advance for the Onam season. They lost everything.”