WEST BENGAL, June 08, 2009, 10.00 Hrs (Pandab Hansda SJ / CBCI News):

South 24 Pargana district is one of the most cyclone-flood affected areas of West Bengal. Aila was 250-350km wide beast with wind speeds exceeding 120kmph that was born high over the Bay of Bengal on 24th of May ’09 which lasted till 25th of May ’09 and was pulled by a monsoon trough northward. The geographic location of the affected areas is about 130 km away toward south from Kolkata. The vicinity of South 24 Parganas is Sundarban which is a collection of islands stretching from India to Bangladesh along the Bay of Bengal. There are almost 173 islands all together of which majority belong Fall under the Bangladesh boarder. Most of these beautiful islands are dense forests without human inhabitations except none rather than the habitat of the world famous Royal Bengal Tigers. People dependent on the forest for everything besides fishing in sea and rivers surrounds the islands. Some of the islands that are inhabited by human are protected from the saline water with embankments. This devastating cyclone has left more than 100,000 people homeless with little or no access to food, safe drinking water, shelter or medicine. The 10 severely affected blocks of the district are Gosaba, Basanti, Kulthuli, Muthurapur-I & II, Canning-1 & II, Sagar, Patharpratima and Namkhana.

AFTERMATH OF AILA
Aila disappeared leaving behind a sea-level of water all over, smashed down trees, blew off the roofs of mud houses, collapsed well-built houses, devastated normalcy of electricity supply, transport and communication infrastructure, destroyed and drifted away individual and common belongings, did not spare many lives of innocent people and the rest lakhs of homeless people left them with awe and wander. The survivors of the fittest were with no law and order. The might was right. All the young and old had to exercise sportive to win over against the abnormal reality. Most of the children, young men, women and elders were destructively deprived of basic human instincts of food, shelter, medicine and clothes. All severely affected people were forced to choose to live in the disastrous island where they remained unattended for several hours by the Government Rescue Operation Forces and the other NGOs.

PRESENT REALITY OF THE AILA AFFECTED AREAS
The Government has been an immediate instrument to reach out to the cyclone-flood affected people who were taking shelter in nearby under safe-roof. Since the transportation and communication systems were totally damaged, it was extremely difficult for any Organization to supply any relief material to any severely affected person. Besides the Government helping the people, CRS provided Bulgur and Oil for some people who were immediately accessed to them.
This little helps were given only to Gosaba and Basanti. After our emergency visit to Canning -I, Canning-II, Mathurapur-I&II and Kulthuli, we have discovered that we need to respond to this devastated situation urgently in concrete ways to meet the needs of the most affected people. We have also noticed that a large number of animals dead bodies and dead fishes come back floating while there is high tide in the river. The appearance of regular high tide severely continues to destroy little existed villages where people could take shelter temporarily. Consequently, the people are faced with a horror of death and the situation produces water-born diseases like diarrhoea and skin diseases. However as the days passed after the cyclone (Aila), the affected people are not free from a continuous danger of death because the logged water preserves the death bodies of animals, fishes, birds and debris. Therefore, the affected people need to be supplied as earliest as possible with relief materials such as tarpaulin, dal, rice, baby food and medicine to sustain them from the danger of death.

INVOLVEMENT OF PUS BARUIPUR
Palli Unnayan Samiti (PUS), the social service society of Catholic Baruipur Diocese operating since its inception in the year 1978, is working in the district of South 24 Parganas. The comparatively affected areas among the 31 administrative blocks are Gosaba, Kultali and to some parts of Basanti where PUS has intervened through two different disaster mitigation programme namely Community Based Disaster Risk Reduction for the last 3 years financially and technically supported by UNICEF and Community Based Disaster Programme by Caritas India. Fr. Soosaiappan Y., the Director of PUS, along with the CBDRR field workers and CBDP animators, has carried out the post Aila relief work.

The staff members and task force members are jointly took up the following proceedings;
• Recover hazard affected people to the under safe-roof.
• Meet PRI members and Block administrative personnel for taking better action for the people jointly with Govt. officials.
• Taking proper care of the affected people in the temporary shelter, cooking, sanitation, etc.
• Trying to free the distorted roads by cutting trees and making communication better.
• Supply safe drinking water for the sheltered families.
• Providing other primary services to the affected people.
• Collecting primary data for proper assessment.
• Supply emergency relief to the affected families wherever possible.
• Provide helping hands to the PUS relief coordination teams at the field level to make the process quicker.

We must acknowledge that still there are so many affected areas where we can’t even reach with flood relief materials. People are still living in an unstable flood relief shelters. They are still desperately looking for drinking water. Now people are temporarily living in high places like river embankments, school buildings etc. Water is still entering to the villages in regular intervals mainly due to tidal effects. At the time of high tide people are taking shelter in nearby the high schools. Government has already started embanking riverbanks to make the people safe from getting affected by high tide river water. We are trying to manage the situation with our limited resources but there are lots of demands in the area for emergency relief materials from the affected families.