Why build high dams if you're going to waste water and electricity?
On 5 and 6 April 1997, six hundred activists from all over Bihar and various parts of India gathered at the small hamlet of Nirmali, fast by the banks of the Kosi in north Bihar. They had come together to protest a process that had begun 50 years earlier at this very place the selling of fantastic dreams.
On 6 April 1947, politicians and technocrats from Patna and Delhi had assembled at Nirmali to announce a high dam on the Kosi, at a site some miles upstream in the hills of Nepal. The 230-metre engineering wonder would rid Bihar of its woe of flood and provide "regulated" water for year-round irrigation. The Kosi would be converted from a river of sorrow to a watercourse of hope.
The Kosi High mantra is still being chanted by politicians and technocrats today, even though over the half century the public has transformed from gullible consumers of development dreams to people who will study their own interest in what the politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen/contractors promise. Big dams, wide highways, and large industries do not necessarily leave them salivating any more. The public now knows to look a gift dam in the mouth, but in their oblivious arrogance power brokers continue to promise the panacea of high dams to the floodplain residents everywhere.