Mayurakshi River—Water Resources and Environments

Mayurakshi flows through Birbhum district, and this river can be called the lifeline of this district. Birbhum district is known as one of the driest districts of West Bengal due to low annual rainfall. In such a situation, the Mayurakshi River provides much of the water for supplying irrigation water to people’s day-to-day use, to a dry district like Birbhum. For the purpose of water supply, the state government has constructed reservoirs and irrigation canals with dams and barrages on the Mayurakshi and its tributaries. But since the volume of water carried by these rivers and their tributaries is not very high, no reservoirs have been constructed to control the floods. As a result, if the concerned department of the government is forced to release a lot of water at once from the reservoir of the dams and barrages due to excess rainfall during monsoon in a year, flooding occurs across the Mayurakshi River basin. Water quality of the Mayurakshi River is good and it was recently excluded from the list of polluted rivers in India by the Central Pollution Control Board.