D.K. Mishra, an expert on floods, on Monday said the Farakka barrage in Bengal was not the sole reason for destruction in Bihar due to deluge. Lack of coordination among the relevant stakeholders was also a cause.

Chief minister Nitish Kumar has repeatedly said the silt deposited in the Ganga after the barrage's construction is responsible for the spate in the Ganga in Bihar.

Mishra, who is the convener of Barh Mukti Abhiyan, said any flood-tackling scheme had to have four sets of stakeholders - politicians, engineers, contractors and the people living in the flood-prone plains.

He was speaking on "River, land and people: the Kosi trail" at one of the sessions of the international conference on Bihar and Jharkhand: Shared History to Shared Vision organised by the Asian Development Research Institute. The five-day conference ends on Tuesday.

Mishra, who studies floods and government policies on fighting the deluge, lamented that the fourth and the most vital stakeholders hardly have a voice in the decision-making process. "Unless the practical experiences of the so-called 'laymen' and 'so-called experts' are brought together on one platform, the possibility of finding a solution to the flood menace will elude us," he said.

Floods were a rural phenomenon earlier, he added, but has now become an urban phenomenon in Bihar. "Earlier, floods were of maximum two-and-a-half days and considered good for agriculture; now they stay for as long as two-and-a-half months, leaving behind massive destruction of human lives, livestock and agriculture produce," said Mishra. "Even if we do not take into account the area which was flooded due to the Kusaha breach in Kosi in 2008, at least 73 per cent of land of Bihar is flood-prone. If we take that area into account, it goes to over 80 per cent."

The penultimate day of the international conference included lectures by delegates from University of London, Union College in the US, Aligarh Muslim University among other institutes.