Asrarul Haque Jeelani for BeyondHeadlines
When the great Himalya wounded, thousand of inhabitants both people and animal faced bloody disaster – rivers crossed their normal flow limits and washed away whatever came their way. The floods affected Uttarakhand badly and the tragedy demanded help.
The massive disaster on 16th and 17th June 2013 in the state resulted due to heavy rain, thunder bursts and break-down of the Gandhi Sarovar above Kedarnath. Many rivers like Bhagirathi, Mandakini, Ganga etc. became very dangerous and flood of these river caused death of thousand of local people and pilgrims of four religious place i.e. Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri and Yamunotri region and washed away many villages, hotels, animals, shops, agricultural land and roads.
People from across the country and various organizations rushed with enthusiasm to help the victims. Students from various educational institutions like TISS, AMU etc. also went to heal the wounded souls. In race of serving the society, young students of Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) also went to help the victims.
With the zeal to serve countrymen in need, four students of JMI went to Uttarakhand under the banner of I-Volunteer and Chaitanya (NGO). Their intention was to do need assessment, collect data about the life lost, damaged building, agricultural land lost, route mapping, list out the relief material with their size for one family, choose place for setting base camp, create network with local organization/people, situation analysis and see how coming volunteers be guided.
These four students moved to Dehradun on 18th of July where they came in contact with an independent social worker Mr. Virendra Pannuly (Retd. Proffesor, IIT) and Ms. Kamla Panth (Retd. DDE), who guided and planed out the way of moving further. After here two teams moved to two different disastrous areas namely Uttarkashi and Guptkashi where the team with the help of local organization and people collected the information regarding the loss and need of the people and analyze the situation.
The Uttarkashi going team Mr. Adil Hussain and Mr. Asrarul Haque Jeelani welcomed by Mr. Suresh Bhai of Himalayee Paryavaran Shiksha Sansthan who is working for relief work. Uttarkashi is the districts headquarter falling on the way (NH-94) to the Gangotri, and river Bhagirathi runs through the valley. This is the flood and earth quake prone zone where every year flood destroys their life. Previous year flood was more dangerous than this year. According to the official data that has been declared on 3rd July 2013, 6 block (Bhatwari, Dunda, Chinyalisaur, Badcot, Purola, Mori), 294 villages, 8357 families and 31484 people has been affected by the flood.
It shows that 8 people has been died (3 in Bhatwari, 4 in Dunda and 1 in Mori), 51 big cattle and 3 small cattle has been washed away, total 460 building has been damaged including kachcha/pakka residential home and business building and 150.196 hectare agricultural land in all 6 block has been effected. When the team were in visit (till 23rd of July) there were three places where road was blocked and they open only for pedestrian at some places (Banderkot and Nalopani) and at damaged road between Matli and Uttarkashi people uses long route of hilly area to go other side. Crossing road near Nalopani was very risky.
At many place whole road has been washed away, many bridges has been broken down due which people are facing problem for connecting to the main road, main market, relief material distributing centre. The situation of the road could be become worst in rainy season. Beside this team came to know various stories at the time of disaster and point out various issues like contamination of water, agricultural land issues, livelihood issues for those who lost their animal and lastly educational issues due to the damage of school building. The team comprises of Mr. Tauseeful Haque, Mr. Javed Ali and one local organization representative, Mr. Pankaj also analyzed the situation of Guptkashi that was more worst than Uttarkashi in the sense of causalities.
Both the team recommended various short term and long term relief and rehabilitation work for both the places according to their need based on assessment. Recently a team went to the Okhimath area where they set up tailoring and stitching training centers and distributed some cash to help them economically.
(The author is a BSW 3rd year student of Department of Social Work, Jamia Millia Islamia)
