Lavanya has worked with AID’s disaster relief programs for over 8 years now. She has been spending the last 6 months in the villages around Badami, helping flood victims. A personal account of what she has observed.

When you see a sparrow’s nest in the house, you know it is an abandoned house. Ironical that these endangered sparrows have made the rain-gushed houses of Badami their nesting homes. Walking by fallen houses, for miles on end, you hear the little sparrows tweeting. You wonder of what joy they sing.

It is numbing to see such a sight of colossal destruction due to flooding and simultaneously see the mindless joys that these little birds are engrossed in. This is the other world of a ravaged place, where the feisty act of god forced people into homelessness, despair, agony, and helplessness. They have made the sky their home.
The Malaprabha River , a tributary of the Krishna River, inundated villages that came her way. An agrarian society that lives on the banks of the river, are aware that when she invades, she leaves a lot of silt and makes the land fertile. But, she also destroys the entire path before here, taking everything with her- livelihood, shelter, people, cattle, crops, and the devotion that people have of her as a life giver.

No land is alien to natural catastrophe, and seldom is the government in a “preparedness” mode, when it ought to be, given the history of flooding that North Karnataka has been experiencing for over a decade now. Flash floods, due to heavy, incessant downpour in a “short duration”. The effects are often devastating, where water levels rise several hundred times more than the normal flow, in the span of a few hours.

In these four months since the floods, there has been an outpouring of help from all quarters. A number of NGOs are seen mushrooming in villages addressing human needs and providing mediums of intervention. But with several NGOs working out of one village alone, you can clearly see the conflicts that arise in the community where each NGO has a self-help group created. More help the better, you would think. But what matters most in these times is the sustained manner in which the NGOs work with people for an extended period and not as if it is a short-term project of just a couple of months. There are instances where NGOs prefer to abandon a village that has complex undercurrents of caste demarcations- where the upper caste community overpowers the decision-making.

I have been working with the displaced people in the remote villages of Badami: Beernur, Taminala, S.K Aloor, Manneri, and Khyda. I realize that India is very different when looked at through the eyes of a landless labourer who tills an upper caste landlord’s holding for as low as 70- 80 rupees, a child torn to nothingness, living in a cramped space, a bonded woman who earns merely twenty rupees a day and a girl child married away the year she attains puberty. Caste discrimination is just one of the few mammoth concerns that plague this land.
The conditions of human lives and their livelihoods do not necessarily improve when the water recedes. People are left to pick up from where they were, before the floods, which is humanly impossible. The initial outpouring of relief comes just like a torrential rain. It comes with a gush and stops when the sun shines. Rescue operations, and immediate relief is but one part of disaster management.

Permanent settlement areas needs to be allocated as soon as possible, with housing, sanitation, clean drinking water, health care systems, educational institutions for children and alternative employment methods must be introduced. From what one sees so far, this process is exasperatingly slow. The victims of 2002 and 2007 floods continue to live in shanty-tin houses. One clearly does not allow people to live in “temporary shelter” for a decade.

The Association of India’s Development (AID) has been working with several partner NGOs like Headstream and Janaarogya Andolana Karnataka. The common goal that binds the group together is assistance in providing a sustained long-term rehabilitation program that begins with the repair and renovation of the damage to critical infrastructure; to helping the village come up with sustained employment opportunities; and training people in leadership skills to fight for their rights. The process of empowering the villages to be less vulnerable to political lethargy and providing them the tools to fight for their rights are making a systematic long-term impact.
I shudder to think what would happen to the world if not for volunteer organizations who silently toil in areas where the government fails rather sordidly. AID has been at the forefront of relief and rehabilitation, and is re-building lives. The simple message we volunteers carry with us is: COMPASSION wherever there is suffering. CONVICTION that the compassion is strong enough to eliminate suffering and the COURAGE to make this conviction a REALITY.