Bharatiya Janata Party leader Venkaiah Naidu has appealed to the Centre to generously help the flood-hit States of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka where hundreds of thousands of people were struggling to keep body and soul together after losing everything — loved ones, homes, belongings, crop and cattle.
In Delhi after visiting some of the worst affected districts of Andhra Pradesh, Mr. Naidu said the rivers Krishna and Tungabhadra had not flooded in this manner in living memory, washing away everything in their way. In many districts there were no roads, no schools, no hospitals, no sanitation and water supply infrastructure left. Hundreds of thousands of families would need semi-permanent homes as it could take nine months to a year for new homes to be built for them.
Mr. Naidu said help from the National Calamity Relief Fund would be simply too meagre. While State governments were doing their best, the task was gigantic and certainly beyond the financial capacity of these States. “Each of the two severely affected States would need Rs. 5000 crores,” Mr. Naidu said, while admitting that at the moment it would be difficult to even arrive at an estimate of the damage.
He said people were disappointed that the Prime Minister had not yet found the time to visit the devastated areas. He hoped the Centre and the people at large would donate generously to help rebuild the shattered lives.
Thousands of people were now in camps and efforts were on to rescue thousands more marooned on “islands,” roof-tops and tree-tops. From clean drinking water to food and medicines and fodder for the surviving cattle, the affected people needed everything in large quantities. But the lack of infrastructure, with the washing away of roads, was making it difficult to get them help.
Even in places where the waters had started receding, there was several feet of mud and slush inside houses that needed to be cleaned out before the homes could become habitable.
In this context, he regretted that some in the Centre were describing the concept of river-linking as disastrous or ecologically damaging. He said unless India went in for a long-term solution to control flooding and drought, such huge calamities would continue to affect hundreds of thousands of people.
On Tuesday, party spokesperson Prakash Javadekar had criticised Union Minister Jairam Ramesh and Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi for making adverse comments about the river-linking concept.
