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A Deluge Of Misery

The worst floods in 20 years aren't helped by political wrangling

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A Deluge Of Misery
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IT had been three days since Gokul Bairagi and his fellow villagers had been marooned without food or water on a mound of dry land at Khanakul, less than 100 km from Calcutta. Then Bairagi heard a chopper over their mound. He started running, for food had finally arrived. But Bairagi died on dry land: he was crushed by jaggery sacks air-dropped by the chopper. "Death stares at you from every direction," says Tapan Chanda, a Khanakul villager. "You might get drowned, electrocuted or get flattened by relief."

The millennium edition of Bengal floods has really been that bad. Consider this. Ten days of deluge have left over 600 dead and another 200 missing in nine affected districts, according to an estimate by the state government. The unofficial death toll is around 1,500. Some 15 million people living in 37 municipalities and 144 village blocks have been affected. Property, including 20,000 homes and 14 bridges and culverts, worth over Rs 3,000 crore have been simply washed away by the raging rivers. "It's really a national disaster," said West Bengal finance minister Asim Dasgupta.

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Clearly, it was the worst floods in Bengal in two decades. Six of the nine affected districts went incommunicado as phone links collapsed. Railway tracks were washed away, some 200 packed cross-country buses were stranded for almost a week on highways and six million people were left with no access to safe drinking water. And if the fury of the swollen rivers breaching frail embankments after heavy rainfall was not enough, flood water discharged from barrages prolonged the agony of the people.

Floods are a way of life in the low-lying delta plains of Bengal. But this time the waters didn't even spare Calcutta. The swollen Hooghly flowed into the city through creaky lockgates, that are supposed to prevent the river water from rushing in during high tide. Water entered Union railway minister Mamata Banerjee's home in the temple neighbourhood of Kalighat. Over 20,000 people living in shantytowns were evacuated. "It was straight out a disaster film," says Sumitava Dutta, a Kalighat resident.

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The scale of evacuation was enormous: some 32 army boats, 40 speed boats, 17 launches and 3,000 country boats moved over 3 million people to 4,000 relief camps. But this wasn't enough: homes were ransacked and shops looted by desperate villagers looking for shelter and food. Food riots also broke out.

The famously sloth Marxist government reacted slowly - and then blamed others for the calamity. Even though Bengal suffers from floods regularly, the government refuses to have a disaster management policy. The upshot: no permanent calamity shelters. Calcutta was flooded because the silted canals had not been dredged for years thanks to Marxist unions that are loath to remove the thousands of encroachers who live on the banks. The decaying lockgates had not been repaired for the past two years. In the township of Kalyani, which the government tries to hardsell to investors, not even a single boat was available for evacuation even as water levels rose to 10 feet. 

The discredited government, now solely obsessed with political survival, characteristically blamed the met office for inadequate warning. Then it asked for a Rs 962-crore bailout from the Centre. This when, according to reports, it has consistently failed to utilise flood control funds: against an outlay of Rs 280 crore, the state could only spend Rs 175 for flood control measures in the Eighth Plan period.

This also turned out to be Bengal's most politicised floods. Mamata floated a bizarre conspiracy theory about the floods being "artificial and man-made", alluding to the hand of the Marxist government in the disaster. "Is there an entente between the Left Front and nature?" hisses cpi(m) politburo member Biman Basu. Even as this unseemly game of trashy political populism was played out, Congress president Sonia Gandhi took a listless chopper ride over affected districts with her jaded lieutenants.

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As the week ended and most of the swollen rivers began receding, the survivors began picking up the pieces of their lives. This will be their darkest festive season in a long time.

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