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'It looks likes a graveyard at night...'

Sharat Pradhan in Gorakhpur

As the sun sets over eastern Uttar Pradesh, this town on the Nepal border turns into a ghost city, shimmering eerily in the light of waters that catch the odd beam of starlight. With large parts of the city still without electricity after flood waters from the Ghagra and Rapti rivers broke through the embankments and inundated several localities, Gorakhpur looks like a desolate graveyard at night.

By day, it might even have looked pretty, had people not been wading through neck-deep waters, speckled with bobbing detritus originating in overflowing sewage lines. And the odd bow wave from the plying boats catch them, making them fight for balance. Everywhere there are houses, buildings and trees sticking out of a vast never-ending expanse of water.

"Watch out, there is a big open drain on your left," cautioned a police official, as this scribe waded through neck-deep water at the Rustamnagar locality. There are still people perched on the roof-tops of their all but submerged houses. They have been up there for 10 days now, going up when the flood waters first washed into the area.

"All that we can do in to evacuate people to our relief camps in safer places. But they are unwilling to leave their homes, says district magistrate Arun Singhal, who describes it as an "unprecedented situation'.

Though an oft-used catchword, this time it is backed by the marooned residents of this city.

"We never imagined in our wildest dreams that we'd have boats going through the city roads," said S K Sundrayal, a bank manager, now living in a tin-shed atop his flooded single-storeyed residence. There are hundreds of thousands like him in and around Gorakhpur, stated to be the worst-hit of the 47 flood-affected of the state's 83 districts. Gorakhpur's toll of 79 lives lost is also the highest in the total of 800 dead.

"With nearly half this city, and about 60 per cent of the Gorakhpur division (including three other districts -- Kushinagar, Deoria and Maharajganj) submerged, at least 800,000 people were marooned, said one senior official.

So the bulk of the 7,500-boats -- most of them airlifted from different parts of the state and neighbouring Madhya Pradesh -- are working on evacuations in the Gorakhpur and Ballia districts.

Hadn't it been for the army, it would have been very difficult for us to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from inundated areas to relief camps," said Divisional Commissioner Rajiv Gupta. There are some 400 to 600 army personnel on the job in Gorakhpur alone.

But even the army finds it difficult to convince hordes of marooned people to move to relief camps in the local university or other educational institutions, converted now into temporary human settlements.

"Despite our repeated requests, they refuse to be evacuated," said Captain R S Pawar of the Engineer Corps, which has been supervising the army's relief operations here.

R S Singh, a resident, explains why: "There are mostly well-to-do people in this Shakti Nagar locality; if they left their homes, the place would be burgled that very night. And whatever little is left intact in the upper floor homes would be gone."

Maqsood Ahmed, a student living in Rustampur, also said thefts were on the rise in the water-logged areas.

Ashok Verma, a businessmen living in a Pratap Nagar flat, had other complaints, saying conditions at the relief camps were worse than those on the rooftop he now considers home.

"You're just dumped either under tarpaulin or polythene sheets on the river embankments or in the halls and corridors of the university. And you have cow dung littered all over because the cattle too have taken refuge there," he says.

However, city Superintendent of Police Dinkar Sinha fears some buildings are so old and weak that they could just crumble anytime, particularly after the water recedes.

Suresh, a young shopkeeper, was carrying a sick family member thorough one of the flooded bylanes on an improvised boat, made out of a charpoy with two inflated car tubes tied beneath. Some people even used karais (a huge flat cooking utensil) as boats, to get away from water-logged areas.

It is most difficult to evacuate those who are already ill, especially from areas where boats cannot go.

But what the marooned residents of Gorakhpur ignore is the threat to their health due to the unhygienic conditions they were exposed to in the water-logged localities. With sewage lines choked and faecal matter floating above while the drinking water sources lie submerged, epidemic like cholera and gastro-enteritis are not ruled out. This, though health authorities claim they've taken adequate preventive measures.

Indian Air Force helicopters airdropping food packets (both dry rations and cooked food) are also dropping chlorine tablets.

"That's the least we can do immediately. At least chlorine tablets dissolved in drinking water would reduce the level of contamination," said a health official. He admitted the problem was more severe in the rural areas, where it was difficult even to get drinking water.

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