Their love for land, cattle makes them stay put on Kosi banks

If I leave the cattle to die, the sin of killing cows will be on my head. I can’t go, says a village elder

Ganga Ram Mandal of village Simraha of Supaul district in Bihar refused to move out of his house despite the Kosi flood alert. Photo: Ranjeet Kumar

Two orange dinghies set out from Kosi Bridge towards Simraha on Monday afternoon with seven men led by Inspectors Ajit Singh and Abhay Singh of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF).

The village’s young deputy sarpanch Om Prakash Kumar greets the team as they land. Mr. Kumar was one of the first to evacuate on Saturday, followed by 350 others from the prosperous, yet squalid hamlet.

“The river has eaten up 30 feet of rice fields from the banks. Usually, it’s never this much,” says Mr. Kumar.

Seventy people, including 10 women and a few children, refused to leave the village. One of them is a prosperous village elder Ganga Ram Mandal. He wears a torn vest and shorts; owns four threshers, a tractor, four water pumps and several heads of cattle. The tractor and equipment have been shipped to a neighbouring village, but there’s no transport to shift the cattle.

“If I leave them to die, the sin of killing cows will be on my head. I can’t go,” he tells the NDRF. The women won’t leave as they have to cook for the men and feed the cattle.

“It’s only for two days dada,” says Constable Anish Jha in Maithili. “Do you want to live with sins of killing cattle or the sin of killing women and the young? If you’re alive, you can always become rich again,” he says.

The NDRF has 15 teams of 45 personnel and six boats each in the six districts of Bihar that may be hit if a sudden surge of water is discharged from the lake created on a tributary of the Kosi in Nepal. Around 2500 army, paramilitary and police personnel have been deployed.

Reports from Nepal suggest that the threat of large scale inundation may have been overestimated, but authorities in India are not leaving things to chance. The memories of devastation and more than 400 casualties in the 2008 floods here are a part of local lore.

“Our first priority is women, children and the elderly followed by others. In addition to boat teams, we have deep divers and medical teams. The greatest challenge is convincing the majority of villagers who are sceptical about the threat,” NDRF Commandant Vijay Sinha told The Hindu . Once back at the Kosi Bridge, the NDRF spots villagers wading through water back to their villages. “After our rescue efforts last year, when our jawans even helped women deliver babies on boats, parents named their children Endyaref Singh. But their love for their land is strong and we are using all our convincing skills to at least get the vulnerable population to safety,” Ajit Singh says.