The Kosi is a “river in Nepal and northern India. With its tributaries, the Kosi drains the eastern third of Nepal and part of Tibet, including the country around Mount Everest. Some of its headstreams rise beyond the Nepalese border in Tibet. About […] 48 km north of the Indian-Nepalese frontier, the Kosi is joined by several major tributaries and breaks southward through the Siwālik Hills at the narrow Chatra Gorge. The river then emerges on the great plain of northern India in Bihār state on its way to the Ganges River, which it enters south of Purnea after a course of about […] 724 km.”

 This is the first passage in which the Encyclopedia Britannica describes the Kosi river, until this part the Kosi seems to be a straight forward river, but the interesting part follows immediately:  “Because of its great outflushing of debris, the Kosi has no permanent channel in its course through the great plain of northern India. It has long been notorious for its devastating floods, which may rise as much as […] 9 m in 24 hours and which long made vast tracts of northern Bihār unsafe for habitation or cultivation.”

The special features of the Kosi river are therefore its high amount of sediments it is transporting and the resulting floods – an aspect we will discuss later more detailed. The last flood of the Kosi river happened in August 2008, the repercussions of which were disastrous. The affected the livelihoods of about 50,000 Nepalese and a staggering 3.5 million Indians from Bihar. The number of deaths is still unknown but according to government officials at least 240 people died, media and locals estimate that the number has to be multiplied by ten to meet reality.

 This was by far not the first flood of the Kosi river and not even the worst, yet it advanced new discussion on the “issue Kosi”. The discussion goes from future flood relief programs over the poor disaster management, to the “blame game”, focusing  on who is to blame for this disaster. Playing the “blame game” in the case of Kosi is easy, yet complex. As Mark Schuller writes in his article “Deconstructing the  Disaster after the Disaster: Conceptualizing Disaster Capitalism” that a flood itself is not a disaster per se, however it is political events that make a disaster out of a natural phenomena.

 The number of political events that made this natural phenomenon a disaster is long; therefore many actors are to blame and many different arguments on the major mistakes and possible future procedures emerge. This article will not have the capacity to elaborate on all these, it will therefore specifically address the issue of the bilateral work on Kosi river disaster management between the governments of India and Nepal. This aspect is especially relevant since the embankments of the Kosi breached in Nepal while the majority of affected people lived in India. Therefore I will argue that one factor which lead to this dimension  of disaster was the bad performance between the interaction of the Indian and Nepalese Governments. 

Furthermore I will follow the argumentation of Meen B. Poudyal Chhetri who recommends in his article “A Practitioner’s View of Disaster Management in Nepal: Organisation, System, Problems and Prospects” that  it will be necessary to install a Regional Information Center to exchange disaster data and share information in disaster prevention and mitigation. This should also be the platform for any official bi- or multilateral agreements.

This Article will be divided in three sections: the first section will be a description of the Kosi flood in August 2008 followed by an examination of the absences of cooperation of the Indian and Nepalese officials. Finally I will contextualize these absences under the aspect of intergovernmental/bilateral arrangements.