Floodwater begins to recede but over 70,000 marooned in Balasore

Around half of the Balasore district remained under water for the fourth day in a row even as state government officials battled all odds to provide food to the stranded people.

Updated on: Oct 16, 2013, 23:29:17 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, Balasore, Odisha

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Over 70,000 people were still marooned in floodwaters even as water level in the two major rivers in the state starting receding.

Around half of the Balasore district remained under water for the fourth day in a row even as state government officials battled all odds to provide food to the stranded people. Additional release of water from dams in Jharkand aggravated the relief and rescue measures.

Divisional Commissioner, Cuttack, Arvind Padhee, who is spearheading the operations, said effort was on the provide food to as many people as possible. Teams of national disaster relief force and Odisha relief force have been deployed in around 100 sq km water logged area. The district administration has also started accessing damage to the crops to provide compensation.

National Disaster Management Authority vice chairperson M Shashidhar Reddy had asked the Odisha government to seek the help of World Bank for building a better disaster management system for both cyclone and floods.

The Odisha government has been at the receiving end for poor implementation of relief measures. In both cyclone-hit Ganjam district and flood-hit Balasore, the locals complained of not even getting ration after the disaster hit them.

The two disasters have affected around 10 million people in Odisha, official sources said.

Residents of Bangali Sahi area come out of an inundated village near Baranga to higher land as their village was flooded since Monday following the cyclone’s landfall. (Arabinda Mahapatra/HT Photo)<em></em></em) — Residents of Bangali Sahi area come out of an inundated village near Baranga to higher land as their village was flooded since Monday following the cyclone’s landfall. (Arabinda Mahapatra/HT Photo)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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