Workers in Kusaha, Nepal, rebuild the Kosi embankment. Picture by Deepak Kumar

Patna, Jan. 11: Determination and hard work, besides skill will help prevent a repeat of the Kosi devastation, said N. Sanyal, the head of the Kosi Breach Closure Advisory Team. It has been monitoring the embankment rebuilding project at Kusaha in Nepal.

“We are using all the skill and hard work at our disposal. If we fail to meet the work deadline, we will dive in the river and create a human chain to check the devastating of settlements,” Sanyal said.

The statement of Sanyal — a civil engineer of repute — sums up the pace, urgency and spirit with which 72 engineers, 1,500 workers, over 20 trucks and 12 rollers and dumpers are engaged in the massive engineering exercise.

The engineers would fill about 1.7km of the breach, which caused the worst-ever floods in Bihar’s history displacing over 30 lakh people and obliterating almost every visible objects in five districts on the Indo-Nepal border last August.

If the breached embankment is rebuilt by the deadline set on March 31, the districts bordering Nepal would no longer see the catastrophe of this magnitude, later termed “national calamity”.

The progress and intensity of the work on the ground level at this stage suggests that the project should be completed before the deadline.

The Rs 250-crore work being carried out by the Vasishtha Private Limited, a Hyderabad-based construction company, has been divided into two phases.

The first phase, which involves closure of 1,700m of breach, is near completion. In fact, the engineers working on the site are sure that the “breach closure work” would be completed by January 15.

The workers have created a 25m base for rebuilding the breached part of the embankment.

“We have been filling the base with silt transported here by trucks. Every layer of silt deposit is aided with boulders and stone chips and then heavily rolled over. This is to ensure cast iron strength to the embankment,” said an engineer working on the site.

Simultaneous with making the base, the workers and engineers have dug two parallel pilot channels through the eastern part of the embankment to channel water towards the Birpur barrage and thus forcing the river to return on its old course.

“Once the embankment is built, we will close the pilot channels and monitor the passage of water through the barrage as in the past,” said one of the engineers.

Officials of the Vasishtha Private Limited said that they had been working on the “guidelines” of the engineers and experts.

Besides closing the breached embankment and creating new embankment, the workers are depositing plastic covered sandbags along the western part of the embankment up to Birpur barrage and creating aprons (deposition of boulders bound in iron chains) along the eastern embankment to ensure that the water, however, ferocious its current is, could not cause a breach in future.

Bihar water resources minister Bijendra Yadav told The Telegraph: “Initially, we had some labour problems. But we have sorted it our by raising the daily wage rate.” There was workers’ strike recently hampering work. The workers’ union demanded that only the Nepal workers would work and that too on the payment of Indian currency at higher rate.

The sources revealed that the government conceded both the demands raising the workers’ daily wage from Rs 100 to Rs 124 and allowing only the Nepal workers to work on the site.

“We are happy now. We are earning well,” said Balam Sardar, working with other men and women on the site.