ABSTRACT
Flooding in Bangladesh has been featured prominently in the Western news media since long before the country gained its independence from Pakistan in 1971. The worldwide perception of the Indian monsoon is inextricably linked to two of the great rivers of the subcontinent, the Ganges and Brahmaputra. Cherrapunji in the Indian Meghalaya highlands, with an annual average precipitation in excess of 11,000 mm, is perceived to lie close to the centre of the flood threat despite being located in the upper reaches of the Meghna watershed. Most of this huge amount of water falls between June and September, a characteristic of the entire flood plain region of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers. Would not a person from western Europe or North America contemplating an early August first visit to Cherrapunji, envisage in the mind’s eye a column of water nearly six times the height of an adult? Notwithstanding this association between inconceivably heavy rainfall and flooding, it has long been assumed that the widespread destruction of the Himalayan forests has served as the driving force for the progressively larger and more frequent catastrophic floods that have been assumed to be a feature of the second half of the twentieth century. This assumption, of course, has been a prominent point of discussion throughout this book.
