Nearly 60% of flood-forecasting stations non-operational: CAG report

Out of 4,862 large dams in the country, only 349, a mere seven per cent, had emergency disaster action plans in place, Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India's performance audit report on flood control and management schemes of Water Resources Ministry revealed. The country's top auditor also found out during the inspection that there were inordinate delays in flood management works, non-operational flood forecasting stations, and inflated costs.

The release of the flood management report coincided with a major flood in Assam, which claimed 73 lives and affected over five lakh people.

The CAG audited funding of flood control and forecasting schemes, their implementation, costs incurred, along with dam safety measures. It sampled 206 flood management programme projects, 38 flood forecasting stations, 49 river management activities, works related to border area projects, and 68 large dams, in 17 selected states, carried out between 2007-08 and 2015-16.

The report said that flood forecasting stations network, undertaken by Central Water Commission from ninth plan onward, was largely non-operational. Scrutiny of water resources ministry records revealed that out of 375 telemetry stations, 222 telemetry stations were non-operational. "As a result, real time data was not available for the corresponding period as indicated," the report said.

The auditor recommended that the CWC should devise a time-bound action plan to speed up the formulation of flood forecast on a real time data communication network by making all the telemetry stations operational and take steps to install all the targeted ones.

Further, flood management works saw inordinate delays as the detailed project reports (DPR) were not prepared as per the guidelines of the scheme. "There were huge delays in completion of FMP works which ranged from 10 months to 13 years due to delay in approval, leading to technical designs becoming irrelevant at the time of actual funding," the report said.

The report noted that out of India's total geographical area of 329 million hectares, more than 40 million hectare is flood-prone. "Every year, an average of 7.55 mha of land is affected, 1,560 lives are lost, and the damage caused to crops, houses, and public utilities due to floods is estimated at Rs 1,805 crore," the CAG report said.