Is Brahmaputra drying?

The water level of the Brahmaputra has fallen so drastically in the past few days that the Inland Water Transport Department had to suspend ferry services between Guwahati and North Guwahati on Thursday. As reported by this newspaper in its Saturday edition, the water level of the Brahmaputra, and for that matter, almost all rivers in Assam, go down from November onwards till the end of February or the beginning of March. But this year appears to be different. The impact of the drastic fall in the Brahmaputra’s water level has also been felt in upper Assam, where at least one ferry plying between Neamatighat (Jorhat) and Kamalabari-ghat (Majuli) last week got stuck on the sand below for several hours in the middle of the river, causing panic among several hundred passengers. The drastic fall in water levels in rivers has been reported from various parts of the world in recent months. According to media reports, the Loire River in France broke records in mid-August last year for its low water levels. A number of photographs have been circulating online showing several other rivers, including the mighty Danube, Yangtze, Rhine, and Colorado, being almost reduced to trickles. Scientists have confirmed that all this is because of the impact of climate change. Rivers are drying up in various parts of the world as climate change is making differences in water distribution increasingly stark. Thus, the behaviour of rivers is becoming more flashy”—more e extreme, such as consistently breaking records for the highest and lowest water levels. Scientists have also confirmed that climate change has many guises. The earth system is interdependent. Thus, when something changes at one particular spot, it cascades to affect lots of other things. What is happening to the Brahmaputra right now is probably only the beginning. It is a fact that the Brahmaputra has been behaving erratically in recent years, causing havoc with floods in certain months and drying up to become just a strand of thin streams in some other months. While a certain portion of the cause is natural, it is now widely accepted that human-engineered changes, including the construction of dams and reservoirs, rapid destruction of forests and green cover, and large-scale pollution, including the massive use of plastic and polythene, have caused huge disturbance to the rivers. The damage caused to the Brahmaputra and its numerous tributaries last week by way of immersing thousands of idols containing, among other things, deadly chemicals is just one example at hand.