Beel.html



A beel near Aloa village, Tangail District, Bangladesh.

Chalan Beel in Natore District

A beel or a bheel (Bengali: বিল) is a term for a pond (wetland) with static water (as opposed to moving water in rivers and canals - typically called khaals), in the Ganga - Brahmaputra flood plains of the Eastern Indian states of West Bengal, and Assam and in the country of Bangladesh. The term owes its origins to the word of the same pronunciation meaning "pond" in the Bengali and Assamese languages.

Formation

Typically, beels are formed by inundation of low lying lands during flooding, where some water gets trapped even after flood waters recede back from the flood plains. Beels may also be caused by filling up of low lying areas during rains, specially during the monsoon season.

There are different causes for the formation of beels. A string of beels is indicative of their being the remains of some great river, which deserted its channel in favour of a new one somewhere else. In other cases, they are probably because of silt deposits, which have raised their beds and marginal banks so high that they flow above the level of the surrounding area. The land between a pair of parallel rivers thus forms a kind of trough in between. The rivers, on the other hand, cannot overflow their banks into these depressions as they are locked within their channels by high levees.¹

Haor, baor

In north eastern Bangladesh there are large water bodies called haors. A haor is a bowl shaped depression which is flooded every year during monsoon. Throughout the rainy season a haor is such a vast stretch of turbulent water that it is thought of as a sea, within which the villages appear as islands. It remains under water for seven months of the year. During the dry season, most of the water drains out leaving small shallow lakes or completely dry out by the end of dry season exposing rich alluvial soil extensively cultivated for rice.²³In the central part Bangladesh, important beels are Katla, Chatal, Nagarkanda, and Chanda. In greater Comilla, Faridpur, Dhaka and Pabna districts the beel is sometimes referred to as baor.¹

Location of important beels

Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, there are thousands of beels of different sizes. Some of the most common names are Chalan Beel, Gopalganj-Khulna Beel, Meda Beel, Aila beel, Dekhar beel, Kuri beel, Erali beel and Arial Beel.⁴ Most of these large beels have shrunk quite considerably in recent decades. Regionwise, in the northwest of Bangladesh some of the larger beels are Bara Beel in Pirganj, Tagrai Beel in Kurigram, Lunipukur in Rangpur, Bara Mirzapur Beel in Narail and Keshpathar in Bogra. The old river course of Atrai is marked by some beels. In the southern region of Bangladesh, important beels are Boyra, Dakatia, Bara, Kola, Patla, Chatal and Srirampur.¹

Assam

In Assam, Deepor Beel is a permanent, freshwater lake, in a former channel of the Brahmaputra river, to the south of the main river south-west of Guwahati. It has great biological and environmental importance besides being the only major storm water storage basin for the Guwahati city. The beel is endowed with rich floral and faunal diversity. In addition to huge congregation of residential water birds, the Deepor ecosystem harbours large number of migratory waterfowl each year. Deepor Beel has been designated as a Ramsar site in November 2002.⁵

References

See also