World | India
Bihar flood survivors struggle to keep afloat
Relief workers in flood-ravaged Bihar are frantically pleading for more medicines, boats, helicopters, plastic sheets, pre-cooked food as well as volunteers.
- By Pamela Raghunath, Correspondent
- Published: 23:12 September 5, 2008
- Image Credit: EPA
- People wade through a flooded field at Kumarkhand village, 580km north of Patna in Bihar.
Mumbai: Relief workers in flood-ravaged Bihar are frantically pleading for more medicines, boats, helicopters, plastic sheets, pre-cooked food as well as volunteers.
Despite the flood situation in northern Bihar being well-covered in media, the reality "is beyond the imagination of many people as well as beyond the control of the authorities as well as agencies", says well-known Mumbai-based social activist Medha Patkar, who is presently in Bihar.
Patkar says after travelling from the worst-flooded areas in Purnea to Areria and then to Muraliganj in Madhepura district, it is that rescue operations are incredibly slow, she says.
The government began deploying the Army and Navy only on Monday, after a delay of 20 days.
Travelling with teams of relief workers from Mumbai and other parts of the country, she informs how in many villages like Kabilasa, Golaha, Bagulaha and Bistoria, where mostly Dalits, landless and small owners and Adivasis live, there is little relief work happening.
"People are surviving on the banks of the canals without food or plastic tents and yet not been declared flood-affected."
Lack of boats to ferry people to safer areas is a major problem, she says. The state will have to move in full force if it is keen to manage the disaster, she says.
Pavan Nair, who spent 30 years in the Army in its Corps of Engineers, and has considerable experience in rescue operations during floods in Bihar, told Gulf News, "The Central Government has declared that 350,000 bottles of water has been dispatched by train. This not matching even a single day's requirement."
Several of his suggestions for quick relief have been included in a letter Patkar wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
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