The Sorrow of Bihar, the Kosi River, has lived upto its name and brought sorrow to the state by flooding and marooning several villages and districts across North Bihar including Purnea, Madhubani, and Saharsa. Lakhs of people have been rendered homeless and jobless. The great leveler that the Kosi River is, it has brought down the walls of religious divides and brutally hit the rich and the poor alike.

Live coverage of the hungry and marooned people, perched precariously atop tree and house tops; floating corpses; wailing babies; and dying cattle has moved even the many stone hearted people. But, the government’s--both the state and the central-- response to the calamity has surprised even the many cynical observers.

While the Centre has given rupees 1,000 crore aid to the state and decided that it was all it could do to give relief to Bihar; the state government, by coming out with a few community kitchens at select places to feed the displaced and the hungry survivors, have indicated that it was all it could do under the circumstances.

The result: the flood victims of the state have been hard hit. In fact, many of the survivors who survived the fury of the Kosi River are in a miserable state knowing not what to do or where to go. Many of them, digging deep into their meagre resources, have begun moving to Gujarat and Delhi and other areas hoping to get a job there.

The result: these areas have seen the flooding of a different kind. Charging sea of homeless and jobless humanity has inundated the many railway platforms and other public areas of these places. One had hoped that at least these states would do what the state of Bihar and the Centre could not do.

But alas, they, too, have failed to rise to the occasion. In fact, they are still to provide any noteworthy relief to the victims, say, such as starting a few relief camps and/or community kitchens to feed the displaced people who have become refugees in their own country.

All this reflects very poorly on the state of affairs in India and its government. The victims of the historically and culturally rich state of Bihar, which is world renowned for Buddhism and Bodh Gaya, and which has a history dating back to more than thousand of years, surely deserved a better deal.