Word: bihar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...felled 60% of its forests in just 40 years, the waters gushed from the mountains in flash floods. By the end of last week, 255 km of roads, 76 bridges, 61 schools and 220 people had been swept away. The water then surged into the northeastern Indian states of Bihar and Assam. Poorly maintained embankments burst, and irrigation channels and dams that had been allowed to choke with silt trapped the flood on the land...
...Friday in Assam, 211 people were dead and 1.3 million were forced to shelter in 1,500 relief camps. In Bihar, 520 people were killed, half a million houses were destroyed and 5.2 million hectares flooded. Farmer Kapelshwar Bhagat, 30, saw 25 neighbors drown in a day, including his 62-year-old uncle who slipped into the torrent after trying to save his own son. Now, Bhagat's one-year-old daughter has cholera and he has only enough wheat to last his family two months. "We're told the floods won't drain from our fields until winter...
...hesitate to kill if they are refused their protection money. He said, "Whether you publish our names or not, we are all dead men in this market." Indians can very well imagine the abysmal depths to which Bangladesh has sunk, because of the situation in the Indian state of Bihar, which is beset by similar troubles. The government's failure to control crime and violence is largely a result of a running feud between political parties. Overriding all this is the spread of intolerant Islamic fundamentalism. H.R. Bapu Satyanarayana Mysore, India...
...Many of the street-side booksellers are migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, India's poorest states, and are almost illiterate in English. Yet they're surprisingly sophisticated where it counts. They master enough English to memorize a list of significant authors and identify them by their book covers; they're also highly attuned to the tastes of the Indian reading public. Diwakar, a 19-year-old book-hawker, rattles off the names of his top sellers with ease: "Barbara Taylor Bradford, Sidney Sheldon, John Grisham" and, of course, "Harry Potter." They also know that pirated editions...
...Trouble in Bihar In the article "State of Fear" [June 30], you described the dire situation in the Indian state of Bihar. Thank you for shedding light on poverty and crime. The sordid fact that kidnapping for ransom is Bihar's biggest industry is a blemish on India. You reported that "even politicians may be cashing in." Although some local politicians may run kidnap syndicates, as one assembly member charged, the sorry state of affairs in Bihar is not solely the work of a few politicians; it is the result of the apathy of the Bihari people. They must rise...