Prior to the brief visit of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to Rayagada on October 14 to review the extent of damage in Rayagada and Gajapati districts due to cyclone Hudhud, the district administration had stated the damage to houses, crops and public properties to be Rs912.446 lakh in its preliminary report.
Higher Education Minister Pradip Panigrahi visited the district to have a further review on the action plan made by the district administration which shared a damage assessment report to the tune of Rs4,867.25 lakh. This is around Rs39.5 crore more than the previous damage assessment report.
“The preliminary report itself is not believable. Though the Collector emphasised that the loss would increase, this huge anomaly proves that the statistics has been fudged in both the reports. This is a conspicuous move and manipulative tactics by the district administration under the leadership of the Collector to garner money to cover up those projects where serious lapses like corruption, administrative abuse and low quality works have been done,” said local youth leader and Kalinga Sena general secretary Guru Sahu.
Guru’s claim can be corroborated with the following facts. Out of the total damage in the preliminary report, the damage to public properties like rural roads, PWD roads, GP/PS roads and school buildings amounts to Rs727.52 lakh and damage to houses is Rs184.926 lakh.Major chunk of the loss which is 80 per cent has been shown as public properties and the rest 20 per cent is shown as house damage in the preliminary report which is 96 per cent and just 4 per cent in the final report sent on October 17 last.
So, when the assistance comes, the major works will either be done directly by the sarkari babus or stage managed through their pet contractors. 93 per cent of the houses are shown as partly damaged for which there is a paltry amount of Rs2,300 per beneficiary.A lawyer Kedar Panda said, “In all the tribal villages, the housing pattern is linear and all the houses have common walls. Generally the mud wall of the last household gets washed away in each rainy season. As most of the tribals are impoverished, their houses are made up of thatch and mud and prone to damage every year.
So every year they repair their houses with mud, cow dung and jungle grass. If the damage assessment is escalated by 533 per cent in total, why has not there been any change in the statistics of house damageIJ”
Both the reports mention total number of house damage as 7,062, the highest number being 1,837 in Bissam Cuttack block. The ground report says a different story altogether when this correspondent with a few other youth leaders of the district visited a few villages and schools of Bissam Cuttack and Kolnara blocks. There is no BDO in Bissam Cuttack block. The ABDO is in charge of BDO for a long period.
As we were told that he was on official tour to the district headquarters, nobody wanted to share with us the damage report prepared by the block development office. We were finally directed to the head clerk who assured us to retrieve data from the ABDO. But to our utter dismay, the ABDO telephoned the next day and expressed his inability to share the details.
In the absence of ABDO, we sought information on damage to school buildings from the Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan (SSA) authorities. An official Nalini Pradhan informed that four primary schools in villages namely Hatamuniguda, Sikabandha, Sindhipanga and Kusumgudi were damaged by Hudhud.Our visit to Hatamuniguda Primary School opened up the Pandora’s Box. Headmaster Baman Chandra Das, who is on the verge of retirement, said that no damage to school occurred due to Hudhud.
There are three class rooms with asbestos roof which were leaking for the last few years and he had reported to his higher authorities but in vain. He also said that in each rainy season, the front class rooms got waterlogged and he was compelled to keep the pupils off from the school for those days.
“May be there is a pressure from the State headquarters to fudge and escalate the loss due to Hudhud. Odisha has already placed a demand for Rs500 crore before the Centre. Modi flew over Hudhud ravaged Visakhapatnam to have an aerial assessment and declared an immediate assistance of Rs1,000 crore. He could have done so in the adjacent districts like Rayagada, Koraput, Malkangiri, Nabarangapur, Gajapati and Ganjam. A layman and farmer like me can assess that Rayagada district incurred least loss due to Hudhud. Of course, this is a novel way applied by the BJD Government to mobilise money from the Centre,” said farmer leader from Munusing village in Suri panchayat under Kolnara block Suresh Mishra.
Along with Suresh this correspondent visited a tribal village named Dokuluguda under Suri which is hardly two km away from block headquarters and 15 km from the district headquarters. We met one old aged tribal couple with disability Ullaka Narayana and his wife Annapurna. The condition of the house under IAY used by them is precarious and it can fall anytime. So also is the condition of ten IAY houses in the same row. Because of the danger, the couple is using the last mud hut for their cooking which gets washed away even in low rain.
“The tribal villagers are in perennial penury like Narayana and Annapurna,” said farmer leader Chikkati Nageswar.