The Kosi tragedy, and the recurrence of such tragedies with devastating regularity, raises fundamental questions about the river management systems and flood-control and flood-relief measures in our country. They also raise questions about the nature of political power, the lack of power in the hands of people, in deciding how our resources should be harnessed and maintained in the interests of society. 

Scores of barrages and embankments have been built in various parts of the country in an effort to tame rivers with a history of flooding. However, scientists and experts have repeatedly pointed out that embankments may not only be ecologically unsound but may actually aggravate floods. The villages within the embankments are constantly in danger of flooding. The land just across the embankments tend to get water logged as drainage of the excess water back into the river is blocked. Moreover, many rivers, especially the Himalayan rivers, bring in huge amounts of silt and this aggravates the danger of flooding of the surrounding regions. Barrages and dams on these rivers have to be regularly de-silted in order to be effective.

Officials responsible for the construction and maintenance of the embankments are typically corrupt and utterly insensitive to the plight of the people living on the river banks. Disasters such as floods are regularly used as occasions to make maximum profits by exploiting the desperate condition of the affected people. Funds marked for flood control and flood relief have largely been misused, to fatten the pockets of the officials and contractors, rather than to maintain the embankments and barrages and minimise the impact of the river flooding on the local population.

People living on the river bank, who are acutely aware of the dangers and are the inevitable victims of the river flooding, have little or no role in taking decisions as to how the flooding of the river should be controlled for the best possible long-term advantage and with the least possible damage to the people and the environment.