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.

The annual maintenance of the embankment was also not done this year, apparently because locals did not allow the contractors to work at the site. People in the surrounding villages were unhappy with the contractors, mainly because they were not being employed for work. However, they said the matters never reached a point where contractors could have been prevented from working at the site.

“There is a clause in the Kosi agreement between India and Nepal that though the maintenance work would be carried out by Indian contractors, at least 60 per cent of the labourers employed for the work should be from Nepal. This was not being followed by the contractors for the past few years, which led to widespread resentment in the surrounding villages. Heated arguments had taken place a couple of times,” said Shamsuddin, who lives in Kusaha.

A Nepali police officer said he had not heard of any incident in which contractors were not allowed to work at the site. “If any such thing had happened, the nearby police station would have come to know. If not, the contractors should have informed the police station. No such thing has happened. This year we did not even see any surveyors coming to the site to assess the situation of the embankment ahead of the monsoon,” he said.

However, The Indian Express obtained a copy of a wireless message sent by the contractors to the state Government in which it is alleged that the engineers and workers were threatened by the people here and were asked to leave the site at Kusaha. It is also alleged that once the staff had left the site, the materials and equipment stored there were stolen by the locals. The message said an FIR had been filed in this regard on August 16 at the Lokahi police station in Nepal.

Meanwhile, work has been going on at the site to prevent further erosion of the embankment. Boulders — heavy stones packed in iron nets — were being dropped in the waters near the embankment to reduce the water current.

Simultaneously, efforts are being made to create a separate channel for the Kosi towards its original course. Once that happens, the reconstruction of the broken embankment can commence. A state government official said it would be at least three months before water from the inundated villages completely flows out.