When Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik asked the Secretaries of various departments to visit the districts regularly, he was echoing the voice of Anjali Suna.
Anjali, who hails from nondescript village Tentuliguda of Koraput district, wanted that the senior officials need to visit the villages to see their plight.
When she was returning from school and was crossing a stream, she found some officials near the stream. It happened for the first time that officials came to the village. Water Resources Principal Secretary Pradeep Jena was there on a field visit. Jena listened to the woes of the villagers through the fearless voice of Anjali.
The little girl shared the incident of flash flood in the stream way back in 2015, when she was among some of the villagers who had got washed away and were rescued by fellow villagers. Anjali also said the flood in the stream stopped them from going to school during rainy season.
A wooden bridge constructed earlier was washed away due to heavy rains and no steps were taken to rebuild another, leaving the hapless families stranded during monsoon. As it was a tiny village, there was remote possibility of replacing the wooden bridge with a concrete one.
Jena was moved by the description about the suffering of villagers and then and there, he asked the Minor Irrigation (MI) Engineer to prepare the plan and estimate for a bridge, which was sanctioned by the Government within no time, admits the MI Assistant Engineer.
Now, a full-fledged bridge is in place connecting her village with the Koraput Municipality and the villagers are happy.
Thanks to the decision of the Department of Water Resources (DoWR), the 50.2 m long, 6.8 m wide and 6.1 m high bridge was completed at a cost of Rs 2.07 crore recently, which can withstand floods. Villagers have decided to name the bridge after Anjali.