Mahananda: Marginal River

Nachiket Kelkar

The few times that the Mahananda river is in the news are ill-fated times for people. The news is about people suffering from its severe flooding in some years, as it breaches embankments and erodes fields, biting off chunks of silt as it snakes down the plains. And then it remains missing from the picture in times of fair weather. With its more infamous neighbour, the Kosi river, hogging news as the “Sorrow of Bihar”, the Mahananda seems to be a lesser sorrow and lower priority.

Meeting the Mahananda River invokes the feeling of meeting someone who belongs to our land, but who everyone has forgotten. It is indeed a river at the margins. The region of eastern Bihar and western West Bengal, through which the Mahananda embarks on a nearly 250 km long journey in India’s plains, is a part of “Seemanchal”, or “border region”. Its tryst with borders also extends internationally, as one of its distributary channels shoots off into Bangladesh. Its marginality also applies to the floodplain people: fishers, farmers, or thousands of migrant villagers who return to their homes only during the floods, to see if all they had is relatively intact. Most riverside villages have a majority population of Muslims, which probably adds to this marginality of the river people.

The reason we have come here is even more obscure and unimportant to the people we meet. Many wonder if we may have made any better use of our time than “counting dolphins”, our constant explanation to the curious heads that turn up on sighting our bright life jackets and kayaks. Even the livestock are amused: a young buffalo scoots off and nearly plunges its herder into the river, running out of control, disturbed by the orange and blue and red of our survey party floating towards it. 

We have not even basic references of any previous scientific work on the river whatsoever – as it has been nearly absent. All this explains why we are here now, in late 2021. The Mahananda remains the only major Indian river to have never been fully surveyed for its biodiversity, including India’s National Aquatic Animal, the Ganges River Dolphin. Clearly, the river has also remained marginal to conservationists so far. Our small expedition is to fill this gap, by providing the first-ever population estimates of Ganges river dolphins in the Mahananda. We record a breeding and resident population of about 200 of them! The fact that the endangered dolphin itself is a marginal entity to the local people is noteworthy. We are largely a disappointment to them because we have not come to solve their flood troubles or find them jobs.

Being at the margin of policy attention has not been good for the Mahananda. The river suffers heavily from sand mining in the upper tracts where gravel-sand is available. Downstream, it witnesses the construction of tepid embankments now and then. Yet the river is rich and productive enough to support fairly intensive levels of fishing. Some of the nets used for fishing may cause threat to the species in the river. From what we hear, hunting of turtles is not uncommon – testimony to this is the fact that we do not see even a single basking turtle in our 250 km of river navigation, despite this early winter time. 

The excitement of discovery in surveying a river unknown to most is always mixed with the fear of disappointment and of returning empty. The Mahananda at once offers us tremendous hope as well as much uncertainty about what the future would hold for it – and for all those who live by it, with it, and within it.

Wherever we camp by the river, villagers surround us with curiosity, confusion, excitement, anticipation, and suspicion (above). Most have never seen a kayak, or plastic tents, or such people. Children surround the kayak and chatter among each other as to how it runs on the water (below).

Photos: Subhasis Dey, Nachiket Kelkar.