Banke villages along Rapti at flood risk after two days of rain

Continuous rain over the past two days in Banke has put people living along the Rapti river at risk of flooding. According to Ratopati, the river threatens the lower riparian belt from ward 2 of Rapti Sonari Rural Municipality down to Narainapur every year, cutting into land on one bank in some places and on the other bank elsewhere. Residents told the outlet that there is no permanent embankment to hold the river back, so the danger keeps growing with each monsoon. They said hundreds of people in around a dozen settlements across the two rural municipalities spend nights in fear when the river is high, and that hundreds of bighas of farmland in the lower stretch have already been lost to erosion. Villages in wards 6 and 7 of Rapti Sonari and several settlements in Narainapur were named as being at risk. A local from Narainapur said an embankment upstream had been breached by the river a few years ago and that flooding and erosion had become more severe from that point since. Minkumar Chaudhary, chair of ward 3 of Rapti Sonari, said the river floods and erodes several villages in wards 2 and 3 at the start of every monsoon and that hundreds of bighas on both banks are washed away each year. He said the water level was rising with the rain forecast for the period and that the ward was warning people to stay safe, adding that a large flood would make the settlements hard to protect. Rapti Sonari chair Tapta Paudel said the rural municipality had asked residents to take precautions against a possible flood disaster. He said five safe shelters, with combined capacity for about two thousand people, are in operation and have been kept ready, and that two more buildings are being built.