BSN: Professor, can give us a little background of yourself and of this study?
Dr. Rogers: Yes. I have had a long term interest in the development of the lower Ganges basin. In 1966 I worked with the Pakistan and Indian governments on a study of population control and development of the lower Ganges basin. Those studies led to a variety of other studies. The Indian government pulled out of the studies in 1967, but we went ahead with funding from the World Bank to do some studies on East Pakistan, which in the middle of our studies became Bangladesh. We were there during the war of liberation.
Many aspects of the water development issue from the Bangladeshi side was discussed in our report submitted in 1973 to the World Bank. Nothing much came out of that. There were lots of other things going on in Bangladesh at that time, political problems and economic problems. Our report went on the shelves like all the other reports.
As you know there is not an awful lot of things that you can do to solve the flood problem entirely within Bangladesh, but there are certain things that one can do. The issue right now is how much can you do within Bangladesh and how much do you need to have international cooperation ... not necessarily agreements, but cooperation ... how long will it take to do it.
I think if you start with the last question .. it takes forever to do one of these things . A typical time to build a big dam is 15 - 20 years, and to build a number of dams that may be necessary to store the waters upstream, it may be 40 - 50 years. So if you think about how long it takes to construct such dams, you immediately come to another question - what can be done inside Bangladesh? After all, if I were a politician, and somebody told me that it would be 50 years before any result would come out of a project, I wold be less than enthusiatic, with perfectly good reasons. Nothing sinister or evil about it.
And a lot of things can be done in the short time. All of the plans have people in Bangladesh living with the floods, the question is whether people can live better, and easier, with the floods. There are all sorts of flood proofing, local flood protection works such as providing some high ground in each of the villages, helipads that will be above flood waters, improved communications, improve the warning systems, make sure the food stores and industry are protected .. the cities should be protected, and it is cheap and easy to protect cities. Many of these things can be done, and more of these things will be done.
BSN: Were all these measures a problem in this year's flood?
Dr. Rogers: Well, it's hard to see what the problems were in the recent floods. When I was in Dhaka and I talked with people and read the newspapers, it sounded like a great calamity, but when I talked with people from the Institute of Development Studies who had just been on a long trip through the country, they didn't see it that way. They said rice prices had not gone up - which is very intriguing, because one of the indicators of a calamity in Bangladesh is the rice price. The government has kept up a steady supply of rice, so that could have kept the price down ... but these people, the economists, didn't think that was the answer. The crop damages may have been only 20 - 30% of the crop, but the farmers were expecting a bumper crop the next season, so that on the whole there would be no serious shortage of food. That also meant that the local food stocks, and the livestock, more or less survived.
So it looks as though the agricultural system in Bangladesh is very robust. It can take a massive flood - and this clearly was a massive one. It was very unpleasant and people suffered for a few weeks but apparently people bounced back. The flood may not even show up in the production statistics even though it reduces the economic potential. In fact, one of my colleagues in the team has been looking at agricultural production statistics in Bangladesh since the late 1940s and what he finds is that you can't see any floods in the production - big floods and small floods do not seem to make any difference. Droughts do make a difference though.
BSN: If the recent floods are not actually as bad as it seemed, why is this study being made now?
Dr. Rogers: This study has one overriding goal, which is to educate the U.S. Congress. The President has to report to the Congress in six months outlining what the international community - the U.S.A. and the countries of the region - should do about two issues: the 1988 floods and the sharing of water resources in the area. The Deputy Administrator of the USAID, J. Morris, was a Peace Corp volunteer in Bangladesh and has a personal committment to resolving some of these issues facing Bangladesh. He and Representative Solarz were effective in getting Congress to look at not only the flood issue but also at the 'low flow'.
BSN: So this study would involve India and Bangladesh both. How would the U.S.A. be able to have the recommendations accepted by these countries?
Dr. Rogers: Well, part of the problem is that there is a political deadline. Both India and Bangladesh have well defined and well known positions. There is the Joint Rivers Commission which meets and discusses the same issues. The only way for any progress is for one side to lower its demands on one of the issues. So we think by stepping back and looking at the problem again .. the broader context ... we may be able to make some progress ... discover things to do which may be acceptable to both sides and different from the issues currently being discussed. You know, from the intellectual point of view that makes a lot of sense ... Not that the U.S.A. would do anything ... it would just say 'Well, you know, if you dealt with this issue this way, and dealt with the Chinese that way, you may get some additional resources that may be helpful. Of course it may be possible that the Indian and Bangladeshi governments are talking about the only alternatives available.
BSN: Then it is not clear what the broad areas of agreement may be?
Dr. Rogers: I see a couple of possibilities that really look attractive, actions mainly by India. One has the ground water from the Ganges pumped down for the dry season. The Ganges basin is like a sponge, and in the monsoon the water level comes up to the surface. The argument is that you can pump more water out of the sponge before the monsoon so that more water would be absorbed during it. You know, it is a well established scientific concept, but it would require some cooperation. Such actions would make some other arguments go away.
So, the high flow could be taken care of this way. The question of low flow on the other hand may become more serious. Remember, the rivers are connected to the water in the sponge: when the water in the sponge is high, it drains to the river, and when the water level in the sponge is low it drains out of the river. If you pull down the water table in the sponge too much, it may get below the bed of the river and the river will dry. So the Ganges instead of having 55,000 cusecs in April may have 0 cusecs. But there is enough water to go around. Of course all this does require complex political negotiations ... it is hard to imagine the Indian government pumping water out of the Ganges and putting it back in it just before the Ganges enters Bangladesh.
There are other possibilities. You know that the Indian plate is moving under the Tibetian plate at about five centimeters a year? This leads to the very unusual situation of columns of fresh water , perhaps six thousand meters deep, at levels higher than the plains. So you could have artesian wells, deep wells where the water would come out of its own pressure ... We are takling about a depth of not 100 or 300 meters, but 6000 meters, the sort of depths that oil companies work at. If you did that then during the monsoon the Himalayan rivers would be absorbed by these regions ...
BSN: Which you could later on tap during the low flow?
Dr. Rogers: That's right. So it is a complete balanced system. It is really attractive. How well it will work, I don't know. As a scientist I can say: of course it will work. It has to work. We are talking about basic laws of physics.
The scale of this scheme from the Bangladeshi or the lower Ganges perspective is staggering. After all we are talking about the largest delta of the world ... it has 20 ... 30 ... 50 thousand feet of sediments, which is just colossal. And then imagine the delta of the rivers, there is Bangladesh itself as the delta of the rivers, but the underwater delta goes down some three thousand km south, two thousand km below Sri Lanka. And it looks just like the surface delta, as it was during the ice age when the sea level was lower. So it is a huge delta, and there is nothing like it anywhere in the globe. The energy involved is also immense ... the monsoon hits India every year with the same amount of energy as 15 thousand 50 Megaton H-bombs, which is the total tonnage we have in the world right now!
So you see the scale is immense, and you have to think of the scale. You can't so easliy have man made structures to control nature at that scale. A perfectly good example is what happened this year at Chandpur, at the lower Meghna river. An irrigation and drainage project there has big embankments. Embankments are normally set back from the banks of the river because the river erodes them. Well, this year the river eroded 1800 feet at that point ... And it wasn't just that the river banks moved up ... what happened was that in a few weeks the river just took off a byte of land some 1800 feet long and 150 feet.
Dams and embankments are not always a solution. In some places they have worked, not because of the works of man, but because the river changed it's course. The town of Sirajganj, which is at the lower end of the Brahmaputra, just before it merges with the Ganges, is in at least its seventh or eighth location. All of the previous sites are under water. So it is not a situation where you can stand up to the rivers. You can stand up to the rivers when they are rivulets, but by the time they are in Bangladesh they have a mind of their own.
BSN: Is dredging of the river beds to increase flow not a possiblity?
Dr. Rogers: Well, dredging of the main rivers is not a serious option because we are talking of billions of tons each season. What is possible is dredging of the distributaries to improve drainage ... but first of well you have to remember that it needs a permanent committment. The reason the sand banks are there on tributaries of the Brahmaputra is because the rivers put them there. You can dredge and get the water level dry in one season ... then ... it silts up again.
There are a few other disconcerting things. As you know, the Brahmaputra has changed its course several times. If you look at the geology of the area, there is a crystalline ridge that runs from underneath the Shillong plateau accross to the hills outside of the Ganges basin. The sediment is very shallow in the area ... we have been talking about 10, 30, 50 thousand feet , but at that point, where the Ganges turns sharply southward, it's 6, 3, 2 hundred feet. And in fact just under where the Brahmaputra is turning there is a little notch, which is more or less a control point. The Brahmapura is an alluvial river, so it builds up a fan, it deposits its sediment. Right now the Brahmaputra is perched on top of its fan, which tends to be convex in shape. This river is in an unstable position, because the gradient towards Sylhet is steeper than the direction towards which it is going. So it is possible that even in our lifetimes, the Brahmaputra left to itself will change its course ... back into the Meghna, through the old Brahmaputra channel. Now if you build river training works in front of a river like that and you push it in the direction of the old Brahmaputra, maybe this little push is all it needs to change its course ... This would be a colossal catastrophe ... What is disconcerting is that there are plans floating around for barrages on the Brahmaputra.
BSN: Do you refer to the dams proposed for the Brahmaputra in Arunachal Pradesh?
Dr. Rogers: No, no. The barrage is proposed near Bhadurabad, and then there is one on the Ganges. There is also the big link canal proposed to connect the Brahmuputra with the Ganges ... All these at prodigious expense ... They can be built ... but how long they will survive? How long will the river stay put? And at the cost of 16 billion dollars!
There are other things you could do in Bangladesh. Such as you could intensify the flooding in areas that are flooded already ... store water in areas like Sylhet, by building low embankments ... sort of organize to take the floods to where you want them to go ... This is an attractive method that that has lots of nice features, one of which is that it is inexpensive. It also uses a technology that has been used in Bangladesh before - low impact imbankments - and to implement it over large areas you need only to have a lot of people to, which you have.
So why not this scheme? Well, I sat in the minister's office in Dhaka, and he explained that politically you couldn't do that, because you know, people wouldn't want to leave the land ... So are floods a serious problem? If they are not, then you don't have to do anything about it. If they are, people have to take serious measures within Bangladesh.
BSN: But a country like Bangladesh does not have the resources for some of the long term flood control measures you mentioned ... it seems that a larger involvement by other countries would help the situation.
Dr. Rogers: Well, yes and no. The thing is that everybody is involved right now. If there were some good ideas that really made sense and looked as though it would work then there would be no problem. Really, everybody is involved now in some sense. The Europeans, the Japanese ... the Japanese have 22 billion dollars for this sorts of things. I have been to all these meetings in Washington ... The French have put together a team ... But you have to get some ideas ... some ideas that can be translated into actions ... I don't think anybody will fund those barrages, for the good reason that there is too much uncertainty.
In terms of internal drainage improvement, I don't think there is a whole lot the international community can do. Now, some of the things can be done through the Food for Work programme, and there can be outside assistance with food, and that is a good way because it does not interfere with the marketing aspects of the domestic production. The big storages that the Chinese built were done similiarly. One in particular that I read about, the equivalent of a very big dam upstream - 7 billion cubic meters of storage - was built in 75 days in China, with 300 thousand people.
BSN: On the Yangtze?
Dr. Roberts: On the Yangtze, yes.
Now who needs the Japanese or the Americans? First of all, we don't know how to deal with those numbers ourselves. secondly, the food to feed the people is what you can provide for them. All the rest is, you know, organizational skills, local, managment ... All of these available resources are, unfortunately, not highly priced in Bangladesh ... as in many other places.
Basically, there is no recorded example of a country that developed by outside assistance ... I remember in '72 people talking about how much aid in billions of dollars they would need to attain this level of development in transport and agriculture etc etc ... That amount of money and more has come and gone ... and agriculture has improved no doubt ... food production has doubled over this period ... but the big economic development promised has not happened. I just don't see any way that large amounts of bilateral or multilateral results in development.
So what is it that foreigners can do? Well, they can stop giving conflicting advice ... in the past few weeks I have had a whole succession of people coming by, people who worked in important - high priced - consulting positions in Bangladesh - and they all disagree with each other. One person comes in and says that this and this and this is what you ought to do, and the next guy comes in and says none of those things will work, you need to do this instead ... and then the next guy comes in and says none of the others know what they are doing ... So if you are sitting in Bangladesh, what would you do? Do you take a vote and decide on what proposal to accept? That doesn't sound very scientific. Well, I know what I would do. I would chuck them all out ... I would just say: "Please go away and leave us alone. We are smart enough to think out these things ourselves."
Unfortunately, the nature of the international community is such that people are not allowed to do that ... and people are under lot of pressure to accept the advise of the consultants ... and some of the things you could hear would curl your hair.
BSN: Your study includes possible flood control issues in Bangladesh. How do you access the data?
Dr. Rogers: Well, there was a master plan study done recently that had a lot of data ... We don't have time to do any new studies ... we just have to look at what is available and what makes sense or what needs to be done ... Unfortunately the master plan document didn't discuss floods ... didn't really propose anything. That is interesting, because it says that floods are not a serious issue ... look at it, it says something like: It is an interesting country and it has flood every year ... and some year the floods are very big, and then dealing with the water planning issue, it gives most attention to the dry season problem ... on irrigation of the boro season and not so much emphasis on the aman season ... and I have disagreed on this emphasis. Why not do something about increasing the yield of less than a ton per hectare to 1.5 to 2 tons per hectare during the aman season? Then you could use the boro irrigation for cash crops ... but in order to increase the yields of the aman season you have to address the floods. You don't have to solve the flood water problem but you do have to deal with the issue in some way ...Some of this goes to these submersible embankments because they don't address the aman crop., they are for getting the boro crop out before the floods.
BSN: This master plan was done by the Bangladesh Government?
Dr. Rogers: They had a consulting company from Chicago ... Haiza Engineering ... It was done with a large group of people in the water board.
Haiza was the gerneral consultant for WAPDA .. for some twenty years in West Pakistan, and ... there is some slip in the concept there, because the idea of a gerneral consultant is do get in there, do the job, and get out. They are a good consulting company, no doubt about it, but if they are there for this long, there is something wrong ... Most of these are very good elite technical agencies, very highly regarded by politicians here and abroad, but the problem is that they don't have any touch with the social, political or even economic aspect of the situation.
BSN: Professor, what is the most important thing that needs to be done?
Dr. Rogers: How do you get people to think about their problems?
There needs to be some basic strategic thinking done by the government of Bangladesh. Bangladesh has a lot of intelligent people in Bangladesh who think very straight about the problems ... but they are not the people who are allowed to think about the problems. There is a tremendous bureaucractic infighting about who gets control to do what ... The Master Planning organization is a good example. It is in a sort of limbo ... it sits out in Banani .. there are some excellent people there ... And now the Water Board wants them under itself. The Water Board has a specific types of set of proposals, and it is not in its interests to think about the problem ... I am not saying they are bad people, but when they are asked to offer a plan, their plan will be what matches their perception of the national goal and their institutional goals at the same time ...
For instance there is plently of water in the low flow of the Brahmaputra. There was a proposal to put floating pumping stations on the Brahmaputra. These are large pumping stations that you put on a barge - you can't use the regular pumps because the river moves all over the place - pump the water out to the local water courses and then the farmers will use their own water pumps to take the water out.
Now, that's a very creative solution to a very tough problem. But even the Minister of Agriculture could not get the Water Board to even consider this proposal. You see, that was not a pucca solution ... doesn't involve brick solutions. Also there was the argument that if we do that then we may give up our rights to the Ganges ... so what you have is that to maintain a demand against the Indians you stop developing ... Now why would you do that? You wouldn't do that if you thought of it that way, but if you think in terms of only your own agency it leads to such situations.
So, look at it: You had a technology that is well established, a pretty powerful minister who understood how the thing worked, wanted to implement the plan, but yet the Water Board opposed the proposal for the floating pumps, and nothing happened ... I think that points to the problem And this is a Bangladeshi problem that must be addressed by the Bangladeshis themselves in some way. ... That is not a problem that anybody from outside can help with, and until these problems are solved there will be no headway ... Everything else is, you know, window dressing ...
So you see, the good news is that tremendous progress can be made at relatively low cost. The bad news is - who are going to do it? If you look at the opposition parties, they are busy running each other down rather than addressing the problem ... So you see my point that it is all a matter of strategic thinking. Everything else falls in place.
BSN: We covered a lot of points, Professor. Could you give us a summary of the technical aspect of flood control in Bangladesh? For instance, you ruled out dredging, because that was too expensive ...
Dr. Rogers: Well, at the micro level dredging is good. The other proposal is to direct water to areas that are flooded, away from area that are not flooded. So if you have something like the Sylhet depression, we would want to increase the depth of the flooded areas ... see if you can retain water by building low embankments ... If you could store some 3 billion cubic meter of additional water in Sylhet, that would make some difference ... reduce the congestation downstream at the Meghna, the exit of the system ... These are thinings you could do in the next twenty years inside Bangladesh that would intensify agriculture ...
Of course when you build the storage sites, we are talking about thousand km sites, not little tanks. They should be used as opportunities rather than viwed as problems, because in all of these areas we have fisheries right now. If you plan for the flooding, you can develop fisheres in modern style in those areas ... The income per hectare is tremendous. You would make more money per hectare in the flooded areas than in the non-flooded areas ...
And then there is a lot that can be done for protection of the urban areas ... It doesn't cost much to build embankments around Dhaka ...
BSN: Is it possible that floods will increase in their severity with each passing year? Say because the rivers are continuously being silted and deforested is increasing upstream ...
Dr. Rogers: Well, you know my ideas on deforestation. I don't think that is making any noticable difference ... But the floods are getting worse in economic terms, simply because the same flood affects more and more people each year. People encroach on flood plains ... there are more things to be damaged ...
But again, the agricultural damages are predominant. But they don't show up over time, because you damage the aman crop and help the high aman crop ...
BSN: That is encouraging, but is there not a trend of increasing severity of the floods over the past, say ten years? If so ...
Dr. Rogers: Well, I see there is a trend of more and more economic damages from the flood, but not that of the physical dimensions ...
BSN: Yet this year's was the worst in living memory ...
Dr. Roberts: In living memory ...
BSN: Is there a possibility of a rise in the sea level from the greenhouse effect coinciding with the annual floods in the coastal regions?
Dr.Roberts: Yes, if this prediction of a 1m sea level rise is true then the situation will be bad. But I don't happen to believe that ... The sea level is rising around the world, some mm a decade ...
BSN: A centimetre a decade ...
Dr. Roberts: That has been documented. But everything else is also moving ... the Indian plate is moving at 5 cm a year under the Tibetian plate ... thats a big move ... The plate is going down under Burma ... There is some indication that the coastal area may actually be rising from sedimentation ... And you know I could not find a decent set of survey maps in Dhaka ... How can you say anything in a country where topography is everything and you don't have a map you can rely on ... In fact the Finnish government has initiated a project at the insistence of a former World Bank economist to push the government of Bangladesh to do a very detailed map, a 1: 10,000, showing water courses, draining, elevation. That's a project for 5 million dollars, not a lot of money when you consider that hundreds of millions are wasted in foolish projects in Bangladesh. In bangladesh I asked to look at the maps, and I was told, "Well, we don't have any detailed topographical maps ..." And how can you do anything without a map? "Well, we don't have any time. This money has to be spent in this much time ..."
BSN: Dr. Roberts, this talk has been most informative. In ending, we would like to note that BSN considers the flood problem as a very serious issue for Bangladesh. We wish to work with other ogranizations that are also interested in flood control. Do you have any comments about how we may be most effective?
Dr. Roberts: Your group as a Bangladeshi group has a lot to offer ... It is people like you who can seriously confront the body politic in Bangladesh, get the issues into the agenda for discussion, hit the the way the whole society in Bangladesh thinks and works on these things. I would think your group could come out with a strong a) we don't believe in the foreign experts until they can demonstrate something b) we must tighten up on micro level issues ourselves, the maps for example. c) the planning should be done by autonomous agencies. You can say these things stronger than foreigners can. It is a long term effort and you have to chip away at it - otherwise you get a sense of "it's too big," or "it's too complicated," or "somebody else will do it"... Nobody else can straighten out the problems, Bangladeshis have to confront the issue themselves. The real solution will come out of that. I would only like it to happen sooner rather than later.
