Floods in Bangladesh II. Flood mitigation and environmental aspects

TO EMBANK or not to embank Bangladesh's major rivers: that is the multi-billion dollar question exercising the minds of both Bangladeshi and donor-country politicians, bureaucrats, professionals and lay persons after the worldwide TV portrayal of the devastation and misery caused by the 1988 flood. In Bangladesh, a strong engineering lobby, with high-level political support, clamours for a priority programme to embark the full length of the country's major rivers in order to convey the flood flow entering the country from India (90 per cent of the total in 1988) safely through to the Bay of Bengal. On the other hand, agricultural, fisheries and lay interests generally favour a non-interventionist approach, for a variety of reasons: conservative and conservationist; the observed poor performance of many large-scale water control projects; and interinstitutional power politics. In the past, most Aid donors have been reluctant to fund big water control projects in Bangladesh: partly on technical grounds (inadequate data; uncertainty about appropriate techniques for regulating such mighty rivers; unsatisfactory experience with existing projects); partly because investment in small-scale flood control, drainage and especially irrigation was perceived to provide a more rapid and less costly means to increase agricultural production. The debate is now on. A UNDP-funded Agriculture Sector Review (1989) recommended continued priority for small-scale irrigation projects. A subsequent