India's eastern Bihar state is ravaged by the worst flooding for 50 years. Whether or not this is a natural or manmade disaster is a hot topic in the Indian press. As reports of overcrowded relief camps, food shortages and riots increase, many commentators are asking who is to blame for the monsoon misery that has engulfed the state.
The flooding started after the Kosi river breached its banks in neighbouring Nepal. Some people are blaming the authorities for not desilting dams and barrages, while others say the scale of the suffering could have been avoided with better disaster planning.
An editorial in Indian newspaper
The Hindu says the relief and rescue efforts of government and state officials have been seriously lacking.
"The task is clearly enormous and overwhelming and the official machinery seems to be out of its depth: thousands of people are yet to be evacuated and many thousands more await succour in a limited number of relief camps," the editorial says.
Aid has been slow in coming, according to The Hindu, and medical assistance remains elusive or inadequate. Many more resources should be given to rescue and relief operations in the short-term, while long-term efforts to help people rebuild their livelihoods should also be prioritised.
In Bihar, the floods have so far displaced about 3 million people and killed at least 90. More than 560,000 people have been evacuated, and some 200,000 have been moved to government relief camps, according to officials.
For Himanshu Thakkar, writing for India's
Rediff news website, the flooding in Bihar is also "a manmade disaster which could have been avoided".
"The governments of India and Bihar are going about the relief work as if it is a favour they are doing for the people," Thakkar adds. "That favour is being doled out in a totally haphazard, unplanned, callous way."
More planning for those displaced by the floods is needed, Thakkar writes, as people are likely to have to stay in relief camps for up to two months.
The scale of government relief is also an issue for Mithu Sadarangani, writing on a debate on the New Delhi Television Limited website.
"The government is still coming out with meagre relief measures like Rs 1000 crore aid ($228 million) and a few lakh bottles of water. Is this what a powerful government, which spends crores on nuclear projects should do for the population?" Sadarangani asks. (A lakh is 100,000 and a crore is 10 million.)
The Times of India meanwhile says that the Bihar state administration was too slow too act on warnings from Nepal on the flood heading to India, exposing systemic failings in the whole machinery of flood response in India.
"Barrages and dams, especially the ones on Himalayan rivers, have to be desilted regularly to be effective," the paper says.
"Many officials responsible for carrying out these works, including maintaining embankments, are corrupt and insensitive to the plight of people living in flood-prone areas. New forms of flood management, with the involvement of stakeholders like people living on river banks and farmers, may be necessary to plug the leaks in the present system," the paper concludes.
The Business Standard newspaper however, raises concerns about the Nepalese governmentÂ?s role in the floods.
A 1954 joint water management agreement between Nepal and India states that the Indian government is responsible for the upkeep of the Kosi river's embankments, while the Nepalese government is in charge of monitoring the flow of water and alerting India to any flood threat, the Standard says.
"Generally, Nepal's authorities had been neglecting this part of their responsibility under the premise that the swollen river does not pose a risk to their country," Dr S Chandrashekhar of the think tank, South Asia Analyses Group, told the Indian paper.
Arab News criticises India for an overall lack of planning.
"The authorities in Delhi must answer for a lack of even basic disaster planning. That is perhaps why they are so sensitive to outside criticism," the editorial says.
Yet local officials are adamant that it is the sheer scale of the flooding that's to blame for the number of people affected.
"This has never happened before. How can you suggest that we could plan for this? Tell me which state can cope with hundreds of thousands of people losing everything," Prataya Amrit, a disaster management official in Bihar, told reporters, according to BritainÂ?s Guardian newspaper.
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