After Nitish, the Flood

In a scandal typical of Bihar, money was sanctioned to repair over a thousand kilometres of zamindari embankments that did not exist. Nobody knows where the funds went

A story of change can easily be sold as a saga of transformation. Witness, for example, the celebrated shift from Lalu’s Bihar to Nitish’s Bihar, touted as one of the big political successes of our times. In this New Bihar, a leader commands the faith of people across the religious divide, with Muslims having voted for the first time in large numbers for a man supported by the BJP; across the barriers of caste, with votes for the first time having escaped polarisation along caste lines; and across the chasm of cynicism, with Bihar’s development no longer the butt of jokes.

While Lalu empowered his voters’ sense of self-esteem, Nitish has entitled the masses to their fair share of upliftment. Girls attend schools on bicycles gifted by the state. Primary healthcare centres actually function, and quite well too. And people are finally getting jobs, not pep talks on overturning hierarchies. Yet, some things remain the same. From the fodder scandal to the flood relief scam, Lalu’s administration was haunted by charges of corruption. So far, Nitish has astutely projected a clean  image of his administration, recently even offering a Rs 5 lakh incentive for whistleblowers of significant scams.

But perhaps it was only a matter of time…

Among the many things that Nitish Kumar’s government has achieved for Bihar’s development, one stands out as a special marvel: as part of a big-budget renovation project, it has repaired over a thousand kilometres of river embankments that never existed in the first place. How exactly this feat was accomplished can now be traced by putting together the state government’s replies to a series of RTI queries. It is clear that hundreds of crore were spent by the state on the project. Who pocketed the money, however, remains unknown.

The embankments made their appearance—on paper—after the state cabinet decided to transfer the responsibility of their renovation from the Department of Revenue to the Water Resources Department on 24 January 2006, merely two months after Nitish Kumar assumed charge as Chief Minister.

Now, Bihar has historically had a set of zamindari embankments, built mostly in north Bihar by the zamindars of yore to keep rivers from overflowing their banks. In 1954, after the abolition of the zamindari system, the bunds’ upkeep was taken over by the state’s revenue department. However, their neglect down the decades was so severe that they were rendered completely ineffective against floods. Officially, it was in response to this problem that all embankments were placed under the care of the Water Resources Department.

The transfer was duly made on 2 February 2006. ‘With its specialised technical experience and budgetary allocations, the Water Resources Department will carry out the renovation and strengthening of zamindari embankments,’ announced the revenue department, ‘This will provide relief to both flood and draught prone areas. At the same time, the renovation… will increase irrigation capacity, which will have a positive impact on agricultural productivity.’

The prospect was welcomed with plenty of enthusiasm; so much so that before long, fictitious embankments started cropping up in various parts of the state. It began once the Water Resources Department, keen to enlist all embankments, sought reports on all those in existence from district officials. By the end of the exercise, the department had a list running as long as 2,367 km—almost twice the length in the records of the revenue department. In reply to an RTI query, on 18 March 2011, the department stated that its figures put the total length of zamindari embankments at 1,286 km and 417 m. The Water Resources Depart- ment, however, had 1,080 km and 583 m extra marked out for renovation. Most of the work was carried out during the first term of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime.

There was more to be done, apparently, in the NDA’s second term. On 25 February 2010, Bihar’s Deputy Chief Minister and Finance Minister Sushil Kumar Modi had an even bigger figure to announce. In his budget speech that day, he said that renovation work was being done in three phases on a total of 2,554 km and 260 m of zamindari embankments. Suddenly, an additional 187 km and 260 m had appeared in official documents. The outlay earmarked for it was Rs 509.7 crore in 2010-11.

Ghostly zamindars, it seemed, had quietly built 1,267 km and 840 m of extra embankments in Bihar that no one was aware of outside the Bihar Assembly.

Money was paid for the work. Who got it, though, is a mystery. Speaking to Open, Vijay Kumar Choudhary, water resources minister, says that most of the work is over. He refuses, however, to comment on the discrepancy in numbers: “These are matters of record. I have become the water resources minister only recently.” Choudhary’s predecessor Vijendra Prasad Yadav, who held the water resources portfolio during the NDA government’s previous term (2005–10), simply refuses to talk to Open on the issue. He is now the state’s minister of energy and parliamentary affairs.

A reply by the Water Resources Department to one of the RTI queries, meanwhile, reveals who was entrusted with the task of drawing up the lists; a week after gaining charge of the embankments, it had written two separate sets of letters on 10 February 2006 asking for the same—one to district collectors and the other to chief engineers. It wanted prompt information. The reply contains a district-wise list of officials (available with Open) whose reports formed the basis for calculating the length of zamindari embankments.

The Water Resources Department’s claims, however, have been contradicted by many of the district administrations in their own replies to RTI queries addressed to them. For example, the department’s 2006 list shows that Darbhanga district has 337 km and 240 m of zamindari embankments, which is 156 km more than the figure mentioned in revenue department’s old list. The district administration, in its reply to an RTI application, reveals that until 22 February 2010 (the date of its reply), no zamindari embankment in Darbhanga had been transferred from the Revenue to Water Resources Department.

Similarly, the district collector of Siwan, in an RTI reply on 19 July 2010, states that the district has no such embankments. However, the Water Resources Department’s list has 3 km and 360 m marked out in the district—which it claims was recorded on the basis of a report sent to it by the district collector on 5 May 2006.

Similar mismatches are seen in the districts of East Champaran and Saran as well. The old list had no embankments there, while the new list gave East Champaran 35 km and 800 m as flood guards, and Saran 524 km and 320 m.

Though the state government has maintained a stony silence over figures appearing out of thin air, the case has been unable to escape the scrutiny of the state’s information commission. In an order dated 12 December 2009 to the vigilance department, asking for a probe of embankments in Darbhanga district, State Information Commissioner PN Naryanan wrote: ‘On the basis of information provided, there are apprehensions of large scale irregularities in the name of maintenance of zamindari embankments… Using [my] authority under Section 19(8)(a), papers relating to all the information provided to the applicant as well as the objections raised by him are being sent to the vigilance department… together with instructions to conduct an appropriate inquiry into the maintenance of zamindari embankments.’

In particular, the vigilance department has probed the renovation of three of Darbhanga district’s zamindari embankments. In its report of 30 June 2011, it noted ‘violations’ and ‘malpractices’ in all three cases, starting from the identification and transfer of bunds to their strengthening and renovation. It also informed the commission that it had written to the Water Resources Department to take appropriate action against guilty officials. ‘The Water Resources Department has informed us… that it has started departmental proceedings against the concerned guilty officials,’ says the vigilance department’s report, adding that it had asked the department to conduct a physical examination of all other instances of such fraud and nail the wrongdoers.

Though the vigilance department’s inquiry was restricted to a small length of the project, what’s notable is that it found irregularities everywhere it looked. This suggests a systematic attempt to appropriate state funds, coordinated at higher levels of the administration, rather than the work of a few corrupt officials in some parts of the state. In other words, it calls for a state-wide enquiry.

It is also worth noting that Bihar’s budgetary allocation for the Water Resources Department has been in spate, to put it mildly; it swelled from Rs 540.08 crore in 2005-06 to a breathtaking Rs 1,800.76 crore in 2010-11.

If that’s not bad enough, there are signs that central funds have been siphoned off too—money meant for the Centre’s Food For Work (FFW) programme, for example, as also the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). An order signed on 18 March 2006 by the District Magistrate of Darbhanga sanctioned Rs 2.2 crore under the FFW programme to be spent by 31 March that year on 30 odd mini projects related to shoring up embankments in the district. By the order, these projects had to be carried out by the executive engineer of Darbhanga’s flood control division, a wing of the Water Resources Department.

Records for NREGS work on embankments have an equally leaky story to tell, say sources in Bihar’s Rural Development Department. The official aim here was to generate manual employment and help labourers out of poverty, so perhaps the non-existence of embankments is not as pertinent as the question of whether the workers who repaired these non-existent bunds were paid. Were they? With so many figures in existence on paper that do not correspond to any reality on the ground, one cannot be sure. It is a sobering thought for enthusiasts of public spending on all causes great and good.

BiharembankmentsNitish Kumar