Where is koshi

He is tall, well-built, hard of hearing but with good memory. He says he used to live close to Baba Karu Dham, 3 km away. The river began devouring the land in the late s. Each time the river eroded the village, they shifted a little away from the embankment.

A few more people join us. They say the sand bar is a huge island, 5 km wide and 25 km long, surrounded by the steams of the river. More than villages are perched on it. Baghaur has one primary school and an anganwaadi. But it does not have a health centre and electricity supply. Some have installed solar panels with government subsidy. Government offices, the police station, banks, all are outside. During the rainy season the river swells 2.

This emboldens the rogue elements. Even the glass is corroded. If you wash clothes with it, they too turn yellow. It is a cylindrical metal container filled with sand and charcoal. Singh has fitted a tap near its bottom. It filters 40 litres of water in a day. As we approach the adjacent Birwar village, a man hails us. He wants to know if we have come for a survey.

Usually, surveys are done for disbursing relief. He too has moved thrice because of erosion. He points to the thatch above and shows us the lines from where it can be dismantled and assembled again. We head for the nearest ghat. To reach there one has to cross three small streams, so we take off our shoes, fold our pants and sink our feet into the muddy bed. At the ghat about two dozen people are waiting for the boat.

After five minutes of sailing, the boat runs aground in a shallow area. The boatman and three passengers quickly jump out and start steering the boat from four sides.

Soon as the boat is eased off, the boatman restarts it and takes us to the embankment. They want to cross a stream, which cannot find its way to the walled Kosi, to reach Belwara rehabilitation village. As the name of the village suggests, people from within the embankments were resettled there.

The sluice gate built to allow the stream to join the Kosi was blown away by the force of water during the floods. Many were resettled in a way it did not help. Others lost their land to waterlogging. These embankments are ticking bombs. He has calculated that the total land trapped between the embankments and lost to water-logging is , ha. White makhana, black lives In Mahishi, we visit a village of fisherfolk called Jhilaki Navtola. It is a village of extremely backward people called Mahadalits , engaged in fishing and makhana fox nut farming.

Closely stacked houses are made of bamboo , but unlike the beautifully crafted huts of Supaul. Soon as we begin asking about fishing two dozen people gather. They say they catch fish— mangur, kabai, sauri, tengra, buari —in the nearby Harsinghi river for a couple of hours and collect makhana from ponds.

The fish in the waterlogged fields are diseased because of the unclean water and chemicals used in farming, they say. And growing makhana in the waterlogged area is tough.

First you have to clear the area of water hyacinth. Then, keeping the invasive creeper away would require more effort. Some of them show grey spots on their hands. They say they acquired these marks from working in the few makhana ponds.

Some of them prefer going to Assam to work in makhana ponds there. The wetlands of northern Bihar have been known for makhana. As the river would recede after the monsoon the depressions would be filled with water, where people would grow makhana. The river is no more allowed to spread and replenish ponds, so makhana farming has shrunk. The black seeds are then dried, roasted and cracked open into white makhana. At Dumri Ghat, where the Bagmati meets the Kosi, two bridges stand like ghosts.

Parts of them have collapsed in the middle, disrupting the only road link between Saharsa and Khagaria. The first bridge was made in Before that the Bagmati had been flowing a kilometre away from the Kosi and would join it a little downstream. To cut the cost of building the bridge, its length was kept short and the Bagmati was made to flow into the Kosi at Dumri. But the concrete bridge could not withstand the strong current of the two rivers and several of its pillars were washed away in The government then built another bridge, reinforced with steel, close to it.

It too collapsed in When all the engineering failed, boatmen in Beldour struck upon the idea of joining their boats together to create a makeshift bridge. They, then, laid a platform of bamboo poles over big boats the size of a truck.

The bridge is ready in January and dismantled by the end of May, so I cannot see it. Bajrang Saini is a suntanned man of about 50 in a lungi and a check kurta. He has plied boats all his life up to Farakka, so he knows many boatmen. He says he collected boatmen from as far as Bhagalpur who plied their boats on the Ganga. Building the bridge takes days and as many people. We realised the gap was a too wide, so next time we doubled the number of boats and these were tied at a gap of one foot 0.

We cross the river along with our Scorpio on a boat run by a diesel engine. Now we head for our last destination Kursela in Katihar district.

Here, after covering nearly km, the Kosi, both mother and dayan malevolent female spirit to its people, quietly disappears into the Ganga under the bright sun. We are a voice to you; you have been a support to us. Together we build journalism that is independent, credible and fearless. You can further help us by making a donation. This will mean a lot for our ability to bring you news, perspectives and analysis from the ground so that we can make change together. Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name.

The Kosi carries a large amount of silt and sand. The sediment deposited on the riverbed impedes its flow, so it frequently erodes its banks and carves a new channel Photo credit: Vikas Choudhary. Subscribe to Weekly Newsletter :. Donate Now. Related Stories And now, politics over Kosi Kosi floods inquiry report submitted, finally Kosi flood again? Residents shifted out of villages within Kosi embankment denied shelter, food Kosi victims run riot Bihar pushes to interlink rivers, tame Kosi Related Video Along the Kosi: through a narrow path.

Post a Comment. In the past, several authors proposed that the river has shifted its course for more than km 83 mi from east to west during the last years. But a review of 28 historical maps dating to revealed a slight eastward shift for a long duration, and that the shifting was random and oscillating in nature.

The river basin is surrounded by ridges which separate it from the Yarlung Tsangpo River in the north, the Gandaki in the west and the Mahananda in the east. The river is joined by major tributaries in the Mahabharat Range approximately 48 km 30 mi north of the Indo-Nepal border.

Below the Siwaliks, the river has built up a megafan some 15, km 2 5, sq mi in extent, breaking into more than twelve distinct channels, all with shifting courses due to flooding. Its unstable nature has been attributed to the heavy silt it carries during the monsoon season and flooding in India has extreme effects. Fishing is an important enterprise on the river but fishing resources are being depleted and youth are leaving for other areas of work.

The Kosi River catchment covers six geological and climatic belts varying in altitude from above 8, m 26, ft to 95 m ft comprising the Tibetan plateau, the Himalayas, the Himalayan mid-hill belt, the Mahabharat Range, the Siwalik Hills and the Terai.

The Dudh-Kosi sub-basin alone consists of 36 glaciers and glacier lakes. The eight tributaries of the basin upstream the Chatra Gorge include from east to west:. The three major tributaries meet at Triveni, from where they are called Sapta Kosi meaning Seven Rivers. The Bagmati river sub-basin forms the south-western portion of the overall Koshi basin. After flowing another 58 km 36 mi it crosses into Bihar, India, near Bhimnagar and after another km mi joins the Ganges near Kursela.

The Kosi alluvial fan is one of the largest in the world covering northeast Bihar and eastern Mithila to the Ganges, km mi long and km 93 mi wide.

It shows evidence of lateral channel shifting exceeding km 75 mi during the past years, via at least twelve major channels. The river, which flowed near Purnea in the 18th century, now flows west of Saharsa. A satellite image shows old channels with a confluence before with the Mahananda River north of Lava. The Kosi River is known as the "Sorrow of Bihar" as the annual floods affect about 21, km 2 8, sq mi of fertile agricultural lands thereby disturbing the rural economy.

During floods, it increases to as much as 18 times the average. Of major tributaries, the Arun brings the greatest amount of coarse silt in proportion to its total sediment load. The river transports sediment down the steep gradients and narrow gorges in the mountains and foothills where the gradient is at least ten metres per km. On the plains beyond Chatra, the gradient falls below one metre per km to as little as 6 cm per km as the river approaches the Ganges.

Current slows and the sediment load settles out of the water and is deposited on an immense alluvial fan that has grown to an area of about 15 km 2.

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