Search for social justice for the victims of erosion hazard along the banks of river Bhagirathi by hydraulic control: a case study of West Bengal, India

Frequent erosion along the banks of the river Bhagirathi–Hooghly constitutes one of the most important hazards in West Bengal, India. This frequent nature of erosion is induced by hydraulic control by the construction of Farakka Barrage in 1975 and Indo-Bangladesh water sharing treaty of 1977 and 1996. Water sharing treaties result in fluctuating discharge on 10-day scale in the lean period (January–May). The stream discharge variability affects the bank erosion through its impacts on erodibility factors of banks. It has been observed that in the pre-Farakka period bank erosion was huge only during the monsoon months, and rest of the year, there was little or no bank erosion because in the pre-monsoon and post-monsoon periods, the river Bhagirathi received very little or no discharge from the river Ganga. But in the post-Farakka period, the river Bhagirathi received considerable amount of water in variable quantities from the river Ganga, especially in lean period which has steadied the river bank erosion in the year round. It is to mention that benefits of this planning are to survive the port-industrial economy of South Bengal and provision of fresh water for inhabitants of Kolkata. So beneficiaries of this controlled hydrology must have to pay affluent tax for the victims by this project. In this paper, the nature, mechanism and pattern of bank erosion and its impact on socio-economic vulnerability of the people in the selected erosion-prone areas have been depicted. At the end, a search for social justice for the victims has been articulated from the perspective of Pareto-optimal justice.