Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
practices were gradually eroded. The colonial ad-
ministration tried to reduce flood damages by
strengthening the existing embankments, and
building new embankments without understand-
ing the existing hydrology. To work, tenants had
to breach the embankments but the authority,
with little knowledge, tried to stop these breaches.
Towards the end of the Colonial Period, with the
depth of the rivers reduced due to siltation and the
embankments deteriorating due to lack of main-
tenance, frequent flooding caused untold suffering
for the people.
The modern period of public initiatives in flood
management began in 1957, with the appointment
of the KrugMission in the wake of the devastating
floods in 1954, 1955 and 1956. At the request of the
then government of Pakistan, the United Nations
sent this technical assistance mission, which em-
phasized the need for flood control to increase
agricultural production. The East Pakistan Water
and Power Development Authority (EPWAPDA),
now known as Bangladesh Water Development
Board (BWDB),was created in1959andwas respon-
sible for the planning, design, operation and man-
agement of all water development schemes.
Consequently, a Master Plan for water develop-
ment, formulated in 1964, included a portfolio of
58 land and water development projects for imple-
mentation over 20 years. On the basis of this plan,
large-scale land and water development schemes
were initiated by the government (Datta 1999).
In 1972, the Land and Water Sector Study chan-
ged the emphasis to agricultural production rather
than flood control, and underlined the need to
consider land and water as integrated resources.
Recommendations included the development of
minor irrigation through low-lift pumps and tube
wells supported by complementary less capital-
and labour-intensive Flood Control and Drainage
(FCD) projects. The FCD schemes are formulated
to achieve three principal and distinctive goals
(MPO 1986):
.
To minimize damage and destruction caused by
catastrophic floods and storms.
.
To provide safety for lives and property and to
minimize damage and disruption of essential eco-
nomic activities.
.
To increase agricultural production through
changes in crop type and cropping patterns.
It should be noted that FCD schemes are not
only used for flood control and drainage, but
also have the additional objectives as mentioned
above. Moreover, irrigation through low-lift
pumps (LLP), tube wells or traditional irrigation
practices and devices are often components of the
scheme. For this reason, the term 'FCD' scheme is
often used interchangeably with 'Flood Control,
Drainage and Irrigation' (FCDI) scheme (Ali 2002).
The National Water Plans (NWP) of 1987 and
1988 were initiated by the government to prepare
a comprehensive water master plan with a plan-
ning horizon up to 1990-2010. The Master Plan
Organisation, known as MPO, was created to
address the different issues leading to water
resources management and develop these plans.
The National Water Plan stresses that:
'...The largest and most significant impact of
flooding is the limiting effect that average flood
levels and the risk of inundation have on the
choice of crops by farmers in the monsoon and
dry seasons. Factors including the normal depth of
inundation, the risk of flooding and poor drainage
force farmers to choose low yielding crop varieties
that canwithstand the expectedflood depth and to
employ very low intensity cropping patterns'.
Despite the many limitations of the plans, both
phases of theNWPmade vital contributions to the
knowledge and understanding of the water re-
sources of Bangladesh. NWP data have provided
the basis for much subsequent water and land
planning. In order to evaluate the potential land
in terms of the nature and depth of annual flood-
ing, the MPO formulated a framework of flood
depth distribution through a classification of land
types according to flood depth. This is the first and
most reliable national land-type database, used in
analytical activity and national planning issues.
The Flood Policy Study formulated in 1988 and
1989 set 11 guiding principles for future flood
management inBangladesh. These principles have
been incorporated in the National Water Policy
(Box 24.1). After the disastrous floods of 1987 and
