In Business Standard, Subir Roy argues, as some civil society organisations have been doing for years, that the embankment approach to flood control is not appropriate for North Bihar and we must find  a way to live with the embankments.Click Here

In the Economic Times, Sudhirendar Sharma who was a member of an earlier fact-finding commission looking into the facts of the perennial floods of N.Bihar also argues against embankments: "Embankments may work on those rivers that are stable and carry moderate silt load. Kosi, in contrast, is a meandering river with maximum available energy producing currents. Having drifted 160 km in the past 250 years, the natural tendency of the meandering Kosi disproves the traditional ‘steady-state’ equilibrium approach of the engineers. Once embanked, its incredible silt load only adds to its defiant nature. The embankments have proven counterproductive in the case of Kosi: arresting the natural dispersion of sediment on the floodplains, thereby increasing deposition, raising the level of riverbed and later breaking of embankments, causing floods and water-logging. Thanks to embankments, Kosi riverbed has risen by 12-15 feet on account of silt deposition that otherwise would have been spread on the floodplains. "