Mahanadi Flood Update: I will be live on Naxatra TV at 9 pm tonite!

Today I will be in another live TV discussion from 9 to 10 pm @ Naxatra TV (Odia News Channel), again over phone from Sambalpur. The discussion is related to silt deposit in Hirakud Dam's reservoir and it's role in the man made flood.

Time permitting, please watch. Thanks.

Mahanadi Flood Update: Hirakud dam expands Odisha's flood geography!

Hirakud dam has not only caused more flood devastation than it has abated, but also has made the 'flood free' areas 'flood prone'. Sambalpur is one such example. In nutshell, Odisha's flood geography has been expanded by the instrument which was implanted to shrink it...

Mahanadi Floods: I shall go live on Naxatra TV at 9 pm tonite!

Please watch Naxatra TV (Odia News Channel) at about 9.10/9.15 pm tonite for a discussion on the current flood management practices.  I shall be there over phone from Sambalpur as they are facing some technical difficulties with their local studio. 

Mahanadi Floods: Hirakud dam's inefficient and non-transparent management costs the common people their lives -

Odisha government's water resources department is so efficient in dam management that it cannot even update the current status of Hirakud Reservoir on it's website. The latest that you get is of 12.00 hours today.  Please see the graph pasted below for the exact position.

At the moment, news are coming in that 46 gates of the dam are open. However, news of backwater flooding from Lakhanpur confirm that the Dam is more than full and has become a 'time bomb'. The FRL (Full Reservoir Level) that the dam authorities report in their website is for 630 but Lakhanpur villages that have been flooded are located beyond 632 feet above sea level. The dam's safety comes to a vulnerable position as soon as the water crosses 610 level. You can imagine what situation we are in. A vulnerability that we can't even imagine. And this means, this reporting in website is also wrong.

And the Dam Management Authority are sitting pretty in Bhubaneswar managing things over phone and in a very non transparent manner.

As a friend rightly said, the government authorities are perhaps waiting for a disaster to happen so that they can bag international award for having successfully managed the relief and rescue operations. People can die. In fact, officially, 24 people have already died in floods this time. The actual figure may be much higher. And, the other species don't come into count.

We have been constantly warning the Govt. of Odisha to modernize the management of Hirakud Dam and make it transparent. Nothing changed in their system. I am afraid, we may see a repetition of 2008 and 2011 floods in Mahanadi.

Live Storage Filling of Major Reservoirs as on 06-Aug-2014

HIRAKUD	RENGALI	BALIMELA	MACHHKUND	UPPER KOLAB	INDRAVATI	SALANDI
92.4%	66.5%	56.4%	50.3%	48.6%	77.0%	95.4%
Time:1200 hrs	Time:1200 hrs	Time:0800 hrs	Time:0800 hrs	Time:0800 hrs	Time:0800 hrs	Time:0600 hrs
Reservoir Level & position wrt. Full Reservoir Level
RL: 628.17ft	RL: 120.22m	RL: 1491.4ft	RL: 2727.4ft	RL: 852.37m	RL: 639.08m	RL: 81.4m
(-) 1.83ft	(-) 3.28m	(-) 24.60ft	(-) 22.60ft	(-) 5.63m	(-) 2.92m	(-) 0.90m
Reservoir Inflow & Outflow
I:760000Cusecs	I:3198.68Cumecs	I:348.91Cumecs	I:96.05Cumecs	I:250.56Cumecs	I:548.9Cumecs	I:155.68Cumecs
O:607113Cusecs	O:573.47Cumecs	O:168.68Cumecs	O:0.49Cumecs	O:56.56Cumecs	O:18.79Cumecs	O:117.84Cumecs
Live Storage capacity & Live Storage available
Cap:482155 Ham	Cap:341371 Ham	Cap:267600 Ham	Cap:96993 Ham	Cap:93500 Ham	Cap:148550 Ham	Cap:55650 Ham
LS:445402 Ham	LS:226926 Ham	LS:150839 Ham	LS:48832.78 Ham	LS:45412 Ham	LS:114362 Ham	LS:53077 Ham
The RED line corresponds to  Full Reservoir Capacity (Reservoir Status accessed from dowr website at 17.00 Hours on 6th August 2014)  (http://www.dowrorissa.gov.in/Flood/ReservoirGraph.htm)

Mahanadi Floods: Hirakud Dam's mismanagement exposed again!

Mismanagement of Hirakud Reservoir is evident from the fact that back water from the Dam is now affecting villages which are beyond the 632 level.  Latest news are coming from Lakhanpur Block's Chikhli, Sardha and Sukhasuda villages where thousands of hectares of crop fields with live crops have been washed away and people are now being evicted by the district administration.  

Mahanadi Floods: Hirakud fails in controlling floods, yet again!

Hirakud dam proves a disaster yet again: Forced to open 19 floodgates at a time when people in the basin are already fighting incessant rain induced floods downstream...

WOW! We have met the MDG target of halving world's poor!!!

This wonder is achieved, if you believe the new World Bank formula of calculating poor! The way our government is now planning to reduce the poor people in 'statistics' instead of reducing poverty, the World Bank's revised Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) is intending to do the same.  The revised PPP and poverty line would mean a dramatic decrease of poor people in India and the globe.  And this would further justify the current form of exploitative global private capital which alienates the poor people from their natural resources and makes them real poor.  And investments in poverty reduction would also be reduced because we would have supposedly achieved the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing poverty by half by the year 2015.  What a formula?

Image: Business Standard at the link shared below

While I have posted the link to the detailed article by Nitin Sethi published in Business Standard on this, the following paragraph is worth quoting here. 

By taking the World Bank-prescribed $1.25 as the poverty line on the previous PPP index, India had 402 million poor people in 2010. But with the revised PPP number, the Centre for Global Development's back of the envelope calculations put the figure at 102.3 million in 2010. Brookings Institution suggests it would fall down to as low as 98.9 million. Global poverty itself would fall by more than half from 1.2 billion poor people to 571.3 million overnight, for economists at least. That means the Millennium Development Goals target for 2015 has been met. The story of this statistical game lies behind the method of calculating the PPP index and the global poverty line.

(Further details @ http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/india-s-poor-may-shrink-75-by-new-world-bank-formula-114080400161_1.html)