Waves of despair after shock

“I do not even have the money to get the rubble cleared from this place, leave alone rebuild the house”, said Madanlal Yadav, a resident of Kosamghat village. The quake flattened all the 125 or so houses in this village. Not one structure was left standing. Ironically, the Kosam trees after which the village is named, preside over the devastation in full bloom. The main occupation of the villagers is farming. They grow wheat and pulses.

“The last two years have been so bad that we have been unable to repay the crop loans. And now this,” wailed Madanlal. A steel almirah in his house is crushed against the wall, covered by a portion of the roof and his prized post session – a black-and-white television set lies overturned and smashed in a desolate corner. “For you, these things may have little value, but for me, they were the world!” he told this reporter.

His was the only other concrete house in Kosamghat. Kosamghat has a population of around 700. Surprisingly no one was killed.

“I wish I was”, laments Akhilesh Tiwari who owned the second concrete house in the village. He had just returned after setting alight the remains of his beloved buffalo calf. It was crushed under the debris, as was his Rajdoot motorcycle for which he is still paying the loan installments.

“None of us would be alive to talk to you had it been winter or the monsoon. You would have been digging for our bodies there,” said 80 year-old Satyawati Tiwari, pointing towards a mound of mud, which she claims was her house.

To beat the summer heat, nearly all the villagers and many townspeople were sleeping in the courtyards when their houses came down.

Arun Shrivas, a resident of Amanpur in Jabalpur city was sleeping on the terrace of his house for the same reason. The wall of an adjoining house came crashing down killing him and his three daughters Rupali 10, Deepali 7, and Mitali 5.

Five year-old Pinki is fighting a losing battle with death at Jabalpur’s Victoria Memorial Hospital, where most of the injured have been admitted. In sheer panic, feeling the entire building tremble, her mother Seema had flung her onto the street below from the third floor. The building never collapsed as she had feared but developed a crack running down a whole wall-face.

Sixty to seventy per cent of the houses in the entire belt have been damaged in varying degrees. “It is easy for someone to say that I got off lightly because my house only has a cracked wall”, says R K Kashyap who manages a local hotel, “but what use is it to me now?”

He lives in a Housing Board Colony consisting of 600 to 700 houses in the Govind Bhavan area of Jabalpur. The crack has “exposed” a powdery substance which went for cement when the apartments were constructed. No one dares to enter the houses anymore. They are literally living on the street.