It is five months since the monsoon ended, but parts of northern Bihar are still under water. The embankments that are supposed to control floods, trap the water instead. When the next rains arrive in June, the rivers will overflow again and the annual ritual of calling for a high dam on the Kosi River in Nepal will begin once more.
In 1928, writing about the floods in the Indian state of Orissa, the chairman of the Orissa Flood Committee, Addams Williams, noted that "…the problem in Orissa is not how to prevent floods, but how to pass them as quickly as possible to the sea. And the solution lies in removing all the obstacles which militate against this result…To continue as at present is merely to pile up a debt which will have to be paid, in distress and calamity at the end." True to his fears, the "debts" have indeed "piled up" in the following years and the time has come to pay back in terms of annual calamities. But the point of reference here is not Orissa, but the annual floods in Bihar.
When the British first came to India, they were essentially traders and had little to do with matters of irrigation or flood control. In fact, they learnt the technique in India, seeing the 14th-century Yamuna Canal built by Feroze Shah Tughlaq, and developed it to collect revenue and were quite successful at that. Where they failed was in trying to tame rivers. After their unsuccessful attempt to embank the Damodar river, the "sorrow of Bengal" as they called it, in the mid-19th century, the British vowed never to touch any river with a view to controlling it—a promise they kept till they left this country in 1947.
Their resolve, however, did not extend to zamindars and local rulers who used their own resources to try and control rivers. Many embankments thus sprang up along the rivers and these ultimately became a matter of great concern to the colonial rulers. For it needed only a breach to wash away any benefits the embankments might have brought over the years. The British were aware of the huge expense in relief and rehabilitation and so refrained from building any embankments. Instead, they tried to improve drainage and remove all hindrances in the path of the water on the assumption that it would improve the flood situation. They were also keeping a close watch on what was happening with the Hwang Ho (embanked in the 7th century BC) in China and the Mississippi (embanked in the 18th century) in the USA, and the stories of calamity that kept coming in year after year.