World | India
'Wet desert' a case study in environmental degradation
As the fog closes in, the waterfalls and the vast plains of Bangladesh gradually disappear from view. The people of Cherrapunji hunker down for another inhospitable night in the world's wettest spot.
- Reuters
- Published: 00:00 September 21, 2004
As the fog closes in, the waterfalls and the vast plains of Bangladesh gradually disappear from view. The people of Cherrapunji hunker down for another inhospitable night in the world's wettest spot.
Perched on the edge of an escarpment, looking down on Bangladesh nearly 1,500 metres below, the remote Indian town of Cherrapunji is more than just an offbeat attraction for tourists and meteorologists.
Cherrapunji, in the northeastern state of Meghalaya (the "Land of Clouds"), is also, paradoxically, a "wet desert", and a case study in environmental degradation, deforestation and resource mismanagement.
Here, where 12 metres of rain falls in an average year, locals say they have scarcely enough water to drink or wash for six months of the year.
In Bangladesh, suffering from its worst flooding in 15 years, locals know only too well where all the water from Cherrapunji is ending up on their doorsteps.
"The ground cannot retain water. With the high intensity of rain, more and more of the topsoil is eroded," said schoolteacher and community worker Mark West. "Whatever water comes in, it just flows down (to Bangladesh)."
Every year in June the monsoon-laden clouds move northwards from the Bay of Bengal until they hit the steep wall of rock at Bangladesh's northern edge. The air cools as rapidly as it rises, disgorging sheets of rain on to the escarpment at Cherrapunji.
In 1833 the British established a colonial seat of government in this town. In 1864 they were forced to move away. Missionary accounts say the soldiers' morale plummeted in the rain and humid conditions. Some even committed suicide.
Rain seeps through the rocks or flows almost immediately off the escarpment in a series of waterfalls, ending up where it is least welcome, in Bangla-desh.
But it is not only Bangladeshis who suffer.
Throughout India's seven northeastern states, trees have been chopped down to satisfy the world's insatiable demand for timber, although the process appears to have slowed since India's Supreme Court restricted logging in the late 1990s.
Many environmentalists say more silt has also flowed into the Brahmaputra River as a result, and that may in turn have contributed to more severe and more frequent floods on the plains of India's northeastern state of Assam.
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