Rains, dam water maroon Balasore

Around a million people have been affected by sudden floods in the Balasore district of northern Odisha caused by incessant rains in neighbouring Jharkhand and release of water from dams upstream.

Updated on: Oct 16, 2013, 01:49:55 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, Balasore (Odisha)

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Around a million people have been affected by sudden floods in the Balasore district of northern Odisha caused by incessant rains in neighbouring Jharkhand and release of water from dams upstream. Thousands are still stranded in villages inaccessible by roads three days after the floods started, though 2.5 lakh people have been evacuated to safer locations.

Despite adequate warning, the district administration failed to cope with the disaster resulting in second embarrassment to the Navin Patnaik government. Patnaik was booed on Monday in the cyclone-hit Gangam district even as angry residents blocked traffic.

Even on Tuesday, angry villagers forced to abandon their marooned villages, blocked traffic on the Chennai-Kolkata highway in Balasore. Thousands of them have made the highways their temporary home. The swelling of rivers Subarnarekha and Bhudabolang was cause of the water fury.

Standing with folded handed in waist deep water outside her shattered home in Gopinathpur village, 65-year-old Jharman Bibi claimed that they have not received any food and were surviving on boiled rice while seeking ‘churma’ from Balasore-based NGO Unnayan.

Balasore district is flood prone during monsoon months but the unprecedented flood came as water was released from dams upstream of the rivers because of heavy rainfall in Jharkhand.

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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