After months of drought, North India now faces a deluge.

Parts of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh are reeling under floods, but the worst-hit is Bihar. More than 10 lakh people are coping with flood waters in the state. Twelve teams of the National Disaster Response Force’s 9 Battalion in Patna and five teams from Chennai have been working to evacuate people living along the banks of the Ganga.

Part of the reason for the floods in Bihar is heavy rain in the catchment areas of dams in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. Bansagar dam in Madhya Pradesh, for instance, released 1.5 lakh cusec of water over two days. Rihand dam, on the border of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, released 70,000 cusec of water.

Over the coming week, Indrapuri Barrage across the Son River in Bihar's Rohtas district is scheduled to release 10 lakh cusecs of water. Rohtas has had 37% more rain than normal this year.

But many other districts in Bihar have received rainfall far below the average. This includes eight of the 13 districts that are flooded now by the inexorable rise of the Ganga’s waters – on Sunday, they rose at the rate of two centimetres per hour.

Munger and Khagaria, both on the banks of the Ganga, have had 54% and 50% less rain than normal in this monsoon season so far. Both are flooded.

Drought to flood

Bihar might be in distress now largely because of dams overflowing. But other states that have been flooded have had unusually concentrated bursts of rainfall. Many of these had suffered droughts just weeks before the monsoon hit. A key feature of climate change is extreme weather events sharply juxtaposed against each other.

Take Rajasthan. Trains were carrying water to Bhilwara in the southeast part of the state in April. In August, large parts of that district have been cut off by excess rain. A school bus even sank in a flooded river and villagers rescued 50 children from it. Baran, Pratapgarh and Chittorgarh, badly affected by flooding now, were all reeling from a water crisis this summer.

The list of drought-hit districts flipping abruptly into flood-affected ones goes on.

In Madhya Pradesh, chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan was recently mocked for a photo of him being carried across a river by policemen while inspecting the flood-hit region of Panna. That was one of several drought-hit districts in the state until a few months ago. Others that were affected include Rewa, Satna, Damoh and Chhatarpur.

In Uttar Pradesh, Ballia, Banda, Hamirpur, Mahoba and Lalitpur were declared drought-hit by the state. All have flooded this monsoon.

There are other consequences to this. Farmers in the Bundelkhand region, noted The Indian Express, had in recent years shifted to crops that were more resilient to drought. Excess rain has now caused crop losses estimated at more than Rs 1,216 lakh so far in eight districts. These are preliminary, incomplete surveys. The ground reality might be worse.