Learning to live with floods - the Orissa example

Bombay News.Net
Wednesday 1st October, 2008 (IANS)

A group of children in an Orissa village are on a new mission. They are going from house to house telling people what to do in case they face a flood - one of the many steps the villagers here have taken this year to minimise the misery the near-annual phenomenon brings with it.

The children, all below 15, are members of a club that discusses local issues. They heard about the last flood on the radio and alerted the 800 households in the village so that they could move to a safer place with whatever resources they have including dry food. They travelled on rafts made of banana trunks.

Nilpura is like dozens of villages in Orissa's coastal district of Balasore, some 300 km from state capital Bhubaneswar. During the last flood this June, most of the houses were submerged.

But the residents say they managed to reduce their suffering as they were well prepared.

About a quarter million people in the region now say they are preparing to live with floods - which they witness almost every year. One measure they are taking - increasing the height of their tube wells. They are stocking up on food as well.

They need to be prepared. Last year, the residents of 25 villages under Bhograi block near the Orissa-West Bengal border faced floods 13 times, usually whenever the river Subarna Rekha flowed above the danger mark.

'This year we witnessed three floods. Of them one was devastating. That hit the region in June. But we are happy that we managed to reduce our misery,' Lambodar Pal, a village elder, told IANS.