Flood Management Policy and (Re)Production of Socio-Spatial Inequalities in the Koshi plain: Nepalese eastern Terai and northern Indian Bihar

Abstract

rise, culminating in the 2008 catastrophe, which resulted in over thirty thousand deaths and massive damage to property and livestock. Fieldwork has largely confirmed these observations. It focused on six villages located between dikes or close to tributaries of the Koshi River or along the devastating path of the Koshi, both in Nepal and India in 2008. The human consequences have been dramatic. The impoverishment of much of the working class, mostly the peasant population, is of staggering proportions, with an unruly increase in the number of landless families facing destitution, with no healthcare or schools, while wealthy classes have continued to thrive. The study of decision-making and distribution circuits reveals a semi-feudal social system controlled by the heirs of former ‘zamindars’ who have remained powerful landowners and influence all management decisions in order to protect their own property, often at the expense of the poor. Thus, a mechanism of privilege and misappropriation of wealth has been established with the help of a largely corrupt and clientelist political power at all decision-making levels, from the elected representative to the engineer, from the entrepreneur to the NGO, and in which mafia networks are now involved. With the obvious decline of central or regional power, insecurity is now rife in the region, which adds to the great vulnerability when faced with serious floods that are destroying and sterilising more and more agricultural land and threatening an increasing number of people.