DON BOSCO CHURCH VADODARA

• Over the last 4 decades Ganges have gulped more than 17 times kilómeters of paddy fields and pushed through its own banks and through the people living there.
• This flooding occurred because India built a barrage in a place called Farakka.
• This Barrage was built to flush the Port of Calcutta which was downstream of the silt that was building up.
• While building the Barrage the engineers did not calculate two things, one that Calcutta was a tidal delta, the tide comes in with 78 times the amount of water than the Farakka Barrage can push out so the silt was not going anywhere.
• Second thing was that the Ganges is the siltiest river in the world. So the silt built up behind the dam hence it raised the riverbed and the river had nowhere to go but to the fields and houses destroying them.
• It left hundreds and thousands of people homeless over the years. These people then migrated to other cities for daily wage works. Those people who are left behind have no income and no livelihood so they married off their children early and children above the age of 6 is forced into child labour. All this resulted in malnourishment in young children.
• This Barrage built not only affected the regions close to the Ganges, it also affected the Sundarbans which has a delicate balance of sweet and salt water for its survival.
• The Barrage holds back the sweet water which disturbs the balance of Sundarbans waters.
• The Barrage also holds back the silts which undermines the resilience of the Delta which threatens millions of people living on it.
• The anadromous fishes living in salt water are not able to go to fresh waters to spawn, which affects Fisheries.
• We should stop narrow departmental thinking like this which led to something like Farakka.