Devastating Floods In East Pakistan

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31762, 20 August 1968, Page 8

Devastating Floods In East Pakistan

(Specialty written for "The Prese" by RALPH JOSEPH)

KARACHI. Floods which swept Pakistan’s eastern province left more than five million people homeless and took at least 200 lives. Starting, early in July, they were caused by heavy monsoon rains in the Assam hills, sending tons of swirling muddy water down the rivers.

Protective embankments burst in several places. Villages and towns were inundated by the score.

First hit were Kurigram and Bogra in the north. Shortly after, with the rains still pouring relentlessly in the hills and plains day after day, all the rivers in the delta region of East Pakistan were swollen and uncontrollable.

From the air, the delta seems more water than land even in the "dry” seasons. In times of floods the whole territory becomes indistinguishable from the Bay of Bengal into which the rivers and their distributaries flow. Slightly elevated land here and there becomes islands, upon which thousands clamber for safety. Rivers Meet

Among the large number of rivers and streams coming down the Himalayas and meeting, almost spitefully, in this one small area, are the normally sluggish Ganges and Brahmaputra. The tributaries and smaller streams are really too numerous to list, and keep changing course from time to time, acquiring new names all the while. They become treacherous at these times. One of them, the Gumti, has for ages now come to be known as the “Sorrow of Comilla.” And sorrow it was indeed for Comilla, a small town 50 miles south-east of Dacca, when around July 13 people living in the town and villages along the river were warned over megaphones that the embankments were likely to burst any moment. It was a familiar cry. Thousands evacuated their homes and scrambled for higher territory. The river broke loose next day: water came gushing with a roar from a breach in one embankment Sandbags, bamboo structures, earth, anything that came to hand, was thrown in to stop the breach, but did no good. People who had been living in remote and inaccessible areas and had missed the warning call were caught unawares and flooded out of their homes.

Large areas in Dacca itself have been under water and all over the province families were found marooned on crude platforms built on

trees, or on embankments and elevated ground along with their cattle, or wherever they they could find shelter. The luckier ones made the covered "country boats” their homes till the water should subside. Only too often human corpses were seen floating in the currents along with the carcases of cattle and other animals. Paddy and jute crops were washed away or ruined by swift currents or simply too much water. Just when it seemed the water was about to recede there came another deluge, this time to the south, in the Lushai hills behind Chittagon port Water swept down from the hills and within about three days the death toll in Chittagong region alone was officially estimated at around 122. At times like this nature seems to mock at rescue and relief work. The population, about the densest in the world here, is far too large to make any sort of relief work at all meaningful. The victims, who live a hard life anyway, learn to take it all in grim silence. The Government, of course, has been doing all it could, Mr Abdul Monem Khan, the provincial governor, has been hopping about from place to place in his helicopter to see things for himself and keep relief work going. Food and medicines have been distributed and shelter provided wherever available. But there have been cries of “too little” and political Opposition groups have pounced on the occasion to attack the Government for what they describe as its negligence. Among the critics were General Azam Khan, the popular former governor now residing in Lahore. Crash Programme

The arguments put forward by the critics had plenty of substance. After the East Pakistan floods of 1954 and 1955, a survey was made by a team of foreign consultants dealing with the causes, frequency, magnitude and effect of floods in the province. The result was the Krug Mission Report submitted to the government. In 1963 and 1964 two other such studies were made by foreign consultants and the province’s Water and Power Development Authority has since drawn up a scheme, based on the surveys, to control the floods. But, say the critics, the government seems to be an unconscionably long time about implementing the scheme. The Flood Commission chief, Mr B. M. Abbas, told the press that the government were now drawing up a “crash programme” to “minimise the effects of the floods.”

“A familiar phrase,” complained the Opposition newspaper, the “Pakistan Observer,” bitterly. So far all the plans and schemes, it went on with cutting cynicism, seem to have found their way “to the archives of costly documents instead of being used as blueprints for action.”