Flooded promises: Bihar’s manifestos stay silent on the state’s deepest crisis

Floods have become Bihar’s most defining and unrelenting challenge, a cycle that year after year uproots millions, erodes livelihoods, and reshapes the landscape of survival. Between 2005 and 2025, spanning four Vidhan Sabhas from the 14th to the 17th, the state’s story has not been written in speeches or manifestos but in the relentless rise of its waters. Each monsoon has returned like a haunting refrain, rivers swelling beyond control, embankments giving way, and lives swept into uncertainty. In total, around 133.88 million people have endured the fury of floods during this period.

The 2025 election manifestos, the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) Sankalp Patra (Resolution Document) 2025 and the INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance)-Mahagathbandhan’s Vision for Nyay aur Vikas (Vision for Justice and Development), demand close and uncompromising scrutiny for what they reveal, and fail to reveal, about Bihar’s most persistent crisis. The analysis that follows examines, with direct reference to the manifestos, every discernible mention of floods and related challenges, tracing how two competing political visions choose to confront, sidestep, or dilute an issue that defines life and politics across the state.

In a state where rivers redraw maps each year, swallowing land and homes, Bihar’s 2025 election manifestos are striking for what they leave unsaid. Both the NDA and the Mahagathbandhan claim to represent Bihar’s future, yet neither acknowledges the crisis that most defines its present, the unending cycle of floods, erosion, and sedimentation that devastates lives and landscapes across North Bihar.

A close reading of the NDA’s Sankalp Patra 2025 and the Mahagathbandhan’s Vision for Nyay aur Vikas reveals contrasting styles but a shared failure of imagination. Both brim with pledges of prosperity, jobs, and infrastructure, yet remain conspicuously silent on Bihar’s most persistent ecological and humanitarian challenge. The word “flood” appears rarely, if at all, despite the fact that the state’s politics, economy, and demography are reshaped by its waters every year. Meanwhile, erosion and sedimentation, which are the very forces that alter the land beneath people’s feet, are not mentioned even once.

The NDA manifesto proclaims the goal of a “Flood-Free Bihar in five years”, pledging a transformative reordering of the state’s relationship with its rivers, a sweeping promise tucked into pages 66 and 67 of its 69-page document. It proposes the establishment of a Flood Management Board and introduces a “Flood to Fortune” model aimed at turning recurring inundations into opportunities for growth. Within this framework, the manifesto highlights projects for interlinking rivers and the rapid construction of embankments and canals intended to strengthen irrigation systems and expand agricultural productivity. The plan also links flood control to enhancing fisheries and rural livelihoods, presenting an image of harnessing water as a resource rather than merely resisting it.

Yet beyond its ambitious headline and technical phrasing, the promise of a “flood-free Bihar” in five years carries a tone of political optimism that sits uneasily against the state’s complex hydro-geography, where flood, erosion, and sedimentation are as much ecological realities as governance challenges. The emphasis on infrastructure, electrification, and welfare projects a vision of development that floats above water, literally. Roads, bridges, and buildings are promised in abundance, yet none of these investments are contextualised within the fragile, flood-prone terrain where they will stand vulnerable to the next monsoon.

The Mahagathbandhan’s Sankalp Patra 2025 presents the elections as a historic opportunity to reclaim democracy and redefine Bihar’s governance. On page 2 of its 32-page document, it accuses the NDA of betraying public trust and highlights baadh aur sukhha (floods and droughts) as enduring symbols of systemic neglect shaping the state’s economy and daily life. Later, on page 27, under the section titled “Water Resources, Flood-Drought Management, and Environmental Protection”, the manifesto outlines a broad vision for ecological renewal.

It pledges to revive panchayat-level water bodies and create new reservoirs across regions, while prioritising the construction of pump canals along the Ganga, Gandak, Kamla, Kosi, and Mahananda rivers. The document acknowledges that enduring resilience depends on community-led and localised efforts, calling for the conservation of traditional water sources as a core strategy. Yet while the Mahagathbandhan’s Sankalp Patra names floods and droughts as Bihar’s defining crises, its vision remains largely rhetorical — broad in promise but thin on the structural pathways needed to confront these recurring realities.

Across both alliances, the policy treatment of Bihar’s river crisis is superficial and fragmented. There is no comprehensive strategy for flood management, structural or non-structural. There is no articulation of sediment management, even though breaches and silt accumulation have repeatedly undone decades of public investment. Issues of preparedness, response, recovery, resilience, institutional reform, and accountability remain conspicuously absent. The vision is transactional, not transformative, and geared towards short-term relief rather than long-term rehabilitation and adaptation.

Infrastructure is projected as a symbol of progress, yet without resilience planning, such development becomes cyclical damage control. Roads and houses rebuilt after every flood are not evidence of advancement; they are monuments to policy inertia. The acknowledgement of livelihood and labour losses stops short of identifying the hydrological roots of these crises. Absent are commitments to decentralised flood monitoring, erosion mapping, or drainage improvement in both rural and urban areas. In a state where riverbeds rise each year under the burden of Himalayan sediment, such omissions border on denial.

The silence of both alliances on the intertwined crises of flooding, erosion, and sedimentation is not accidenta, it is structural. Despite decades of data, research, and lived suffering, Bihar’s political class continues to treat its rivers as peripheral to governance. There is no vision for managing sedimentation that raises riverbeds and worsens flood levels, no clear stance on embankment realignment or safety audits, and no mention of erosion compensation for families who lose land to shifting rivers.

Even urban flooding, now an annual event across Bihar’s cities, finds no serious mention. The absence of proposals for improved and decentralised early warning systems, integrated drainage planning, or urban–rural flood coordination reveals a blind spot of staggering proportions. Disaster management is framed as welfare, not planning, the response is administrative, not ecological. Both manifestos continue to operate within the grammar of politics rather than the logic of resilience.

What emerges from this comparative reading is not mere indifference but an entrenched failure of political imagination. The NDA’s Sankalp Patra 2025 and the Mahagathbandhan’s Vision for Nyay aur Vikas differ in rhetoric but converge in silence. Neither offers a credible, science-based, or community-driven roadmap for managing the combined challenges of flood, erosion, and sedimentation that have crippled Bihar for generations.

Bihar’s rivers are not simply natural systems — they are political realities that test the capacity and integrity of governance. By ignoring them, both alliances reveal a deep detachment from the people who live by these rivers.

In a state where rivers routinely reclaim land, erase livelihoods, and displace millions, silence is not neutrality — it is complicity. Bihar does not need another catalogue of schemes and sops. It needs a scientific, participatory, and long-term river management policy that treats floods, erosion, and sedimentation not as annual tragedies but as systemic challenges demanding integrated action. Until such a vision takes shape, each monsoon will continue to expose the bankruptcy of political will — and every flood will stand as a reminder that in Bihar, even promises are not waterproof.

To move beyond this entrenched politics of neglect, Bihar must begin to see its river systems not as seasonal disasters but as the lifelines of its economy and ecology. A few urgent actions, which should have found space in the manifestos, are essential to set this course right:

• Reframe the state water policy to embed a comprehensive river basin management framework — anchored in basin-level planning that integrates flood, erosion, and sedimentation dynamics, coordinating departments across water resources, environment, agriculture, and disaster management under a unified structure.

• Establish an erosion and sediment management authority mandated to conduct embankment safety audits, annual sediment budgeting, and erosion mapping, ensuring that interventions are guided by science rather than political expediency.

• Decentralise flood governance by empowering panchayats and municipal bodies with data, technical training, and resources to implement localised flood preparedness and early warning systems.

• Invest in community-led water and land conservation by restoring traditional ponds, wetlands, and chaurs as decentralised buffers against floods, while protecting groundwater and soils through indigenous knowledge systems.

• Integrate urban and rural flood planning by linking city drainage networks to surrounding floodplains to prevent urban flooding from being treated as an isolated problem.

• Institutionalise transparency and accountability through open flood data, real-time monitoring, and social audits of embankment and relief expenditure, ensuring that governance is as much about prevention as it is about response.

Bihar’s rivers demand memory, not amnesia,  policy, not platitude. The 2025 manifestos may have missed the tide, but the course can still be corrected. The test of political will lies not in promising a flood-free Bihar but in building a flood-ready Bihar, one that learns to live with its rivers, not against them.

Eklavya Prasad is managing trustee, Megh Pyne Abhiyan. Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth