Farmers in seven haor districts in north-eastern Bangladesh were racing against time with their boro harvest after rivers in the Meghna basin swelled steadily in the past two weeks.
The Flood Forecasting and Warning Center under the Bangladesh Water Development Board raised an alert for a flash flood in the first week of May amid forecasts of heavy to extremely heavy rain continuing in upstream India over the next five days, starting today.
The floodplains of haor, a land depression where water runs down in hours from the massive hills of Meghalaya and also from the hills in Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, and Assam, are where Bangladesh grows roughly a fourth of its boron.
Boro is the main rice grain of Bangladesh, accounting for half of the country’s annual rice production of about 4 crore tonnes. The harvest of boro began in the middle of April and has continued in full swing.
‘We have been warned about the possibility of a flash flood on May 3,’ said Matiuzzaman, who is in charge of looking after crop production in Sylhet division, the biggest haor region, as an additional director at the Department of Agricultural Extension.
Farmers were working very hard to reap their harvest before the potential flash flood, he said.
Farmers in the haor region, which also included Mymensingh, Netrakona, and Brahmanbaria districts in addition to the four districts of Sylhet division, did not complain, unlike their colleagues elsewhere in the country, about the ongoing heatwave since it helped them dry their paddy after harvest.
The prospect of a flash flood is what farmers were most afraid of. The memory of a massive spell of pre-monsoon heavy rain that triggered a flash flood in 2017 is still fresh in memory.
The flash flood destroyed most of the boron cultivated in Haor during the year.
On Monday, the DAE confirmed a harvest of 69 per cent of boron cultivated on 4.53 lakh hectares of haor land until April 28.
‘Rivers in the region are on a rising trend, and the Met Office predicted heavy rain in the region from May 2,’ said Sarder Udoy Raihan, executive director of Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre.
‘We are observing the situation very closely,’ he said.
In the flood forecasting bulletin issued on Monday afternoon, the FFWC said that the rivers in the Sylhet, Sunamganj, Moulvibazar, and Habiganj districts could rapidly rise over the next 48 to 72 hours.
The FFWC bulletin showed that the rivers in the districts were flowing one to five meters below the danger marks on Monday.
The rivers in the region are flashy and highly unstable, implying that they can swell several meters in a matter of hours, FFWC officials said.
The India Meteorological Department, in its bulletin issued on Monday afternoon, warned of widespread to extremely heavy rain over the next five days over Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, and Tripura.
The Meghna is one of the three major rivers that form the Bangladesh delta.
The combined basin of the three rivers is 1.72 million square km, only seven per cent of which falls in Bangladesh, which drains most of the water collected in these vast basins.
