Here, hope arrives on floating logs

A floating platform made of logs tied to empty oil drums is the only way that Ashwinbhai Patel can hope to enter Kanisa village, of which he...

A floating platform made of logs tied to empty oil drums is the only way that Ashwinbhai Patel can hope to enter Kanisa village, of which he is the acting sarpanch, to distribute food packets.

Residents of this village where every household has at least one relative settled in either Fiji, Canada, US or UK have been cut off from the outside world ever since torrential rains hit Gujarat. The village high school has one computer for each of its 33 students and the affluent village even boasts a Fiji Chowk — a pointer to the source of some of its money. But for now it is having to employ the most primitive methods to survive.

Nearly 10 days after the rains, Kanisa with its 3,500 people is still flooded with neck-deep water; the village, made up of higher ground where the affluent Patels live and the low-lying areas where the backward classes live, cannot be entered by foot or even on a tractor.

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Since the Anand District Administration has not provided boats to shift people to higher reaches, the villagers have themselves built two small, crude floating platforms to shift more than 350 people from their flooded houses to the high school building.

“The entire village was flooded but since we live on higher ground the water has receded faster here. But it is our duty to take care of these villagers who are stranded,” Harishbhai N Patel, an affluent farmer, says.

All the villagers are angry that no way has been found to drain the flood waters, nearly eight feet high in some places. Water cannot flow towards the fields in neighbouring areas since they are all flooded. The water flows towards Khambat, 13 km from Kanisa, but a culvert there has collapsed, trapping the water.

Just yesterday they heckled the Kanisa sarpanch, Nitaben Patel, over the failure to drain the water. As a result the acting sarpanch does not dare to enter the village proper — the food packets are distributed by the villagers themselves.

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Khambat Mamlatdar K J Shah says the district administration cannot do much when there is no way to enter the village. “We sent people there, but they could not go inside and returned. We also sent a team today. I don’t know what happened to them. We have not yet thought of a solution for the water in the village. It will dry up naturally once the sun comes out,” he says.

Anand District Collector K G Jhalavadia says he has more pressing matters to deal with. “As people’s lives are not in danger, the rest of the work can wait. We are busy with providing food to more needy people,” he says.