The Village That Is Moving
Baghmari is a village of 1,180 people on the south bank of the Brahmaputra in Morigaon district. Village maps show 340 hectares in 2011 and 265 hectares in 2021. The primary school, built 90 metres from the bank in 2008, now stands 32 metres from it and has developed cracks; the well beside it has turned brackish. The road to the market is cut for about three months each year. Fifty-two households have already moved to a rented strip beside the highway, from where the men travel 11 km to their fields.
The Gaon Panchayat has ₹40 lakh of untied funds and may apply for one state scheme. Three proposals are on the table: (i) a stone embankment, estimated at ₹1.4 crore, protecting about 90 hectares for 15 years - engineers warn the river may shift and erosion may worsen downstream; (ii) bamboo and sandbar plantation along 1.5 km, costing ₹9 lakh, which slows erosion locally but not at the school; (iii) shifting the school and the 15 most exposed households to a new site, part of a ₹2.6 crore package.
Seventy-four per cent of households depend on farming; 60 families fish in the river.
1. The Panchayat must decide what to do with the ₹40 lakh now. Give a recommendation and state the criteria you used.
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First, notice the scale mismatch. No single proposal fits ₹40 lakh: the embankment is 3.5 times the funds, the full relocation package is 6.5 times. A recommendation that says 'build the embankment' is therefore not a decision the Panchayat can actually take.
Criteria: cost against the number of people protected; speed of effect; reversibility; who bears the residual risk; and whether the measure creates false security that encourages people to stay in a danger zone.
Recommended package: spend ₹9 lakh on plantation immediately, because it is the only measure that fits, acts within one or two seasons, and protects the remaining riverside fields; use about ₹25–30 lakh to move the school's usable rooms and the most exposed households, with the education department meeting part of the school cost; and apply to the state scheme for the embankment, attaching an independent erosion study and a condition that no new construction is permitted on land it protects.
Reasoning: the plantation alone leaves the school in danger, and relocation alone abandons farmland. Sequencing cheap, fast, reversible measures while the expensive, slow, possibly harmful one is appraised is the defensible choice. A student who recommends the embankment without showing how ₹40 lakh becomes ₹1.4 crore has not answered the question.
2. A student argues: 'Only 75 hectares out of 340 were lost - 22 per cent. The village is exaggerating.' Evaluate this argument.
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The arithmetic is right; the inference is wrong. Seventy-five hectares is a real loss, and the rate matters: 7.5 hectares a year, roughly the size of fifteen school playgrounds, continuing every year.
The figure hides three things.
- Composition. Erosion takes riverside land first, which is usually the best-watered and most accessible paddy, and it takes homestead land, not only fields. Fifty-two households - perhaps 250 people - lost the ground their houses stood on, which no hectare count records.
- Public assets. The school, the approach road, the burning ghat and the well are all within the loss zone; the well is brackish, so drinking water is already affected even where land remains.
- Second-order costs. The road is cut for three months; relocated men travel 11 km each way; fields are fragmented. These reduce income without removing a single hectare.
Conclusion: hectares measure only one dimension. A better indicator is the share of households that have lost a home, or the share of agricultural income at risk - here 74 per cent of families farm and 60 fish, so both are exposed.
3. Demand for the embankment is the loudest. Give two reasons it might not be the best answer, and one condition under which you would support it.
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Reason 1 - cost and benefit. ₹1.4 crore to protect 90 hectares for 15 years is roughly ₹1.04 lakh per hectare over the period, before maintenance, and the figure assumes the structure holds. Against this, the Panchayat's own untied fund is ₹40 lakh, so the project depends on an external scheme whose maintenance the village may later be asked to fund.
Reason 2 - the river may punish the choice. Engineers themselves warn the channel may shift and downstream erosion may increase. Embankments can also create a false sense of safety: once a bank is 'protected', families rebuild closer and the school is expanded, so that a breach later destroys more than it would have. The 2017-type experience of sudden deep flooding shows how quickly that reverses.
Condition for support: I would support it if an independent study confirmed that the bank is stable enough for the structure to work for its design life, if the state scheme covered capital cost and a maintenance fund was separately assured, if downstream villages were consulted and compensated for redirected erosion, and if building on the protected land were regulated rather than freely allowed. Without those four conditions the embankment is a promise that cannot be kept.