Boats, not cars or two wheelers, are the dowry items of choice in the flood-prone Kuseshwarsthan region of Bihar's Darbhanga district.
Parents of grooms openly demand boats as dowry in the flood-prone area.
"Boats are in high demand as dowry because boats are the life-line for locals here. It is the only way to connect to the world outside thanks to water-logging eight months in a year due to floodwater," said Maheshwar Singh, a resident of Tilker village.
Singh had handed over a boat to the groom's family during his daughter's wedding earlier this year. He told rediff.com that a boat is considered to be a status symbol in waterlogged Kuseshwarsthan's villages.
"The groom's family's first demand is a boat. Parents of the bride often have a tough time arranging money to buy a boat," said Kundan Sahni, a resident of Kewatgama village.
"A boat is as useful here as a four wheeler is in other places. People use boats to go from one place to another, attend marriages, funerals or even to go for a medical check-up. We cannot think of life without boats. So it has become a desirable dowry item," Singh said.
"Only powerful and well off families have their own boats. Most poor people struggle without a boat, but all of them demand a boat as dowry," he said.
The trend of demanding boats as part of the dowry has been reported from several villages in Madhepura, Saharsa, East and West Champaran, Sitamarhi and Madhubani.
Incidentally, thanks to an acute power shortage in urban pockets like Patna, Gaya, Muzaffarpur etc, generators and inverters are topmost in the dowry list.
But taking a serious view of the matter, the Bihar government is planning to construct more embankments to control floods and protect millions of people from being uprooted.
"An action plan is being prepared by the department to construct more embankments to provide protection to millions of people living in flood prone-districts," said Bihar Water Resources Development Minister Vijay Kumar Choudhary.
The minister said that till date, the state government has constructed 3,629 km of embankments to protect the lives and property of people in over 30 lakh hectares of land out of a total of 68.8 lakh hectares in flood-prone areas.
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