At ground zero in Kusaha village of Nepal, it is easy to see how human neglect has contributed to the breach in the embankment along the Kosi, leading to a change in the river’s course last month and causing one of the worst flooding disasters in Bihar.

One can also see why it will take at least months of mammoth state effort to bring the river back on to its original course and stop the heavy flooding in thousands of villages.

The river bed along the original course, which is almost completely dry now because there is hardly any water flowing through it, is at least a few metres above that along the new course. Years of deposition of silt, which should have been cleaned annually, had been steadily raising the river bed along the original course, making the flow of water along that course more and more difficult.

The only thing that had been forcing the Kosi waters to flow along its original course was the embankment built in Kusaha in the late 1950s, which started coming under increasing pressure because of the water’s natural tendency to flow along a lower terrain. People here told The Indian Express that there had not been any de-silting operation in the last four years at least.

“Even earlier, the de-silting operation was at best a half-hearted exercise. The amount of silt that you can see could not have been deposited in a single year,” said O P Gupta, who lives in a neighbouring town and claimed to have worked at the site when the embankment was being built in 1958.

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