The citizens of Nepal as well as the government is opposing the work.

The Chief Minister, along with water resources department (WRD) minister Vijay Kumar Choudhary and Principal Secretary Afzal Amanullah, made an on-the-spot assessment of the situation along the eastern Kosi embankment and at Birpur barrage on Friday.

He said he wants to assure the Nepal government that the restoration of the downstream flow of the river along its central or pilot channel would not cause any harm to anyone.

Nitish said that the river was now flowing close to Eastern Kosi embankment over a length of around 28km. The urgent need is to bring it along the central or pilot channel between the two embankments. Efforts were being made to achieve that through the dredging work.

Reports from the spot said that when the dredging work started at the end of April this year after due intimation to the Centre by the Bihar government, Nepalese citizens belonging to Gobargarha village in Sunsari district, not far from Western Kosi embankment, took out a procession protesting against the start of the dredging work.
After that CDO (equivalent of DM in India) of Sunsari stopped the dredging work through a letter delivered to Indian engineers at Birpur barrage. It is for this reason that the dialogue between India and Nepal governments has become so important and crucial in this particular case, sources in Bihar government argues.
Nitish recently met the Union water resources minister Salman Khursheed in this regard. The latter is likely to visit Nepal soon to take up the issue of flooding in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, mainly caused by Himalayan rivers, whose origin is in that country.

Bihar’s water resources minister, after a visit to Birpur on Sunday last, wrote a letter to the Union water resources ministry for holding a meeting of Kosi High Level Committee (KHLC). It needs to be recalled that it was breach in the eastern Kosi embankment in Kusaha in Nepal in August 2008, which caused devastating flood leading to the death of thousands of people and displacement of 33 lakhs.

In the last few years Kosi has been mounting heavy pressure on the eastern embankment due to excessive siltation, resulting in the formation of a heap of sand on the western side. In order to reduce the pressure on the eastern embankment and to regulate the flow of river equally on both sides, the engineers had planned to build a seven-km long pilot channel in the downstream of the Kosi barrage. But this Rs 11 crore project has been shelved due to the objections raised by the people of Nepal and the Nepal government.

Choudhary has reportedly directed the engineers to take alternative measures for the protection of the embankment. Reports said that the engineers have now started dredging out sand from the river with the help of a dredger machine. But the success of this scheme is doubtful because of considerable increase in the water discharge. This was simply because of rains in the catchment area. Besides, monsoon is only a couple of weeks away.

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