Word: rains
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...bamboo pole to save him from a black tide of sewage, pollution and the occasional swollen body floating past her front door. "It's like living on the edge of a boat," she says. "The snakes swim under the bed." With August historically bringing the heaviest rain, the U.N. is warning of worse to come. As corpses rot and contaminate the floodwater, doctors expect the death toll to skyrocket, with waterborne diseases such as cholera (already contracted by 15,000 Nepalis) and dysentery (currently infecting 5,000 people a day in Bangladesh) turning into full-blown epidemics. "This is just...
...devastating floods, though, are only half the story. To the south and west, another disaster is taking shape, albeit at a slower pace. Despite seven years of poor rain, state governments have yet to produce coherent plans for rain harvesting or water storage, and existing reservoirs, channels and pipes are notoriously badly maintained. In 11 states across central and western India-including the "bread basket" states of Punjab and Haryana-this year's rainfall is 20-59% below normal. In Vidarbha region in central India, only 10% of the land is irrigated, despite continual pleas from farmers for the local...
...dichotomy of farmers with too much and too little water just hours apart from one another produced a bizarre schizophrenia in India's government last week. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh toured the floods, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram was asking businessmen to pray for rain and warning that drought might cut economic growth to below 5%. And when Singh arrived in Bihar, the state asked in the same breath for $2.4 billion for flood alleviation and $890 million for drought. "It's crazy," says Bihar air-relief coordinator Gautam Goswami. "Absolutely crazy...
...British, Cherrapunji lost its trees and topsoil after decades of slash-and-burn agriculture. Today, fruit and vegetables are trucked in from hours away. It's a scene repeated across many arid parts of India and would be unremarkable but for one fact: with an average 12 m of rain a year, Cherrapunji is the wettest inhabited place on earth...
...Despite the plentiful rain, the local authority says it doesn't have the money to build water traps to stop the deluge from washing into Bangladesh. A rain-harvesting scheme died after residents complained that maintaining the water tanks was too expensive. But the larger truth in a country where droughts and floods are annual events is that only catastrophe prompts action. That may come to Cherrapunji one day, as it did to others this year. But for right now, it never rains in Cherrapunji. And then it pours...