Hi All: This is all the information I could collect on the Orissa drought situation including two articles by Srimoy Kar in the Indian Express. --- Priyadarsan [News brief from the Hindu] The release of the CRF to the States is based on the memorandum of demand. Andhra Pradesh, for instance, has put its loss in the Nov. 6 cyclone at Rs. 5,400 crores. Orissa, on the other hand, has sought Rs. 585 crores for the drought situation in the Bolangir and Kalahandi districts. The standard procedure is that after the receipt of the memorandum, the Centre sends its team for a spot assessment. The team gives its recommendation to an Inter-Ministerial Group headed by the Union Agriculture Minister. The NFCR is also headed by the Union Agriculture Minister with the Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission as its member. Two Central Ministers _ now the Ministers of Finance and Defence _ are nominated to it. Five Chief Ministers are also nominated on this body by annual rotation. This year, they are the Chief Ministers of Orissa, Assam, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka. ------------------------Articles by Srimoy Kar ------------ BOLANGIR, November 7: The plight of a six-year-old child, Gundhar Nayak, whose mother died of starvation at Barlabahali village, in the Bangamunda block of this district, has left the authorities unmoved. Even 20 days after the newspapers highlighted his case, no help has reached him. In Orissa these days, starvation deaths and the misery that follows, cause no concern in the administration. In fact, they are promptly attributed to ``mischief'' by the Opposition. And like the proverbial ostrich, the officials go back to bury their heads in the sand. Gundhar's village was in the news recently when a team of Janata Dal legislators stumbled on the case of his widowed mother, 35-year-old Balmati Nayak, who had died of hunger. The boy was suffering from acute malnutrition and fever. Orphaned, he had only an indifferent step-brother, Sushil, to turn to. The JD leaders brought him to Bolangir and got him admitted to a hospital. He was given treatment for 10 days and then discharged. The boy was left to fend for himself at a time when the district is in the grip of a severe drought which has forced many to migrate to other places. Gundhar's rickety frame is wracked by his incessant coughing and he is quite sick. But no official has visited him so far. He survives on the food that he gets occasionally from the local school under the mid-day meal programme. This, too, he has to share with his idle brother. The villagers, who are fighting for their own survival, can only sympathise with him. Bangamunda's block development officer (BDO) concedes that Gundhar has not been given any help but is quick to rationalise. ``It is not possible to attend to individual cases,'' he argues, pointing out that ``the boy gets food under the mid-day meal scheme.'' He is very candid about his inability and passes the buck fast. ``Frankly speaking, I can do very little about it,'' he says. ``If you are suggesting that the boy be shifted to a rehabilitation centre or an orphanage, it is only the Collector who can do it, not me.'' ollector Vinod Kumar agrees that his administration has been unable to do anything for the boy so far and assures that he would be looked after. Not all officials are indifferent to the misery of the villagers. The BDO of Muribahal has taken charge of eight-year-old Samir Dharua, son of another woman, Sapur Dharua, who died of starvation in Gudighat village, on October 26. ------- (Nov 10, 1996. The Indian Express) Orissa has been in the news for starvation deaths in Kalahandi. This time, even Bolangir was not spared, reports Srimoy Kar. This is a region that knows drought like the back of its hand, coming as it does in the rain shadow zone. If one were to map it, it would be the Padampur block in Bargarh district and the Khaprakhol, Muribahal, Bangamunda and Tureikela blocks of Bolangir district and the Khariar block of Nuapada district in western Orissa. Today, while the whole state is reeling under the tragedy of drought, Bolangir district is clearly the worst affected. The fact that the rains have failed seems to have cast a pall of gloom in all the 14 blocks of the district. Even in those regions that have access to irrigation, crop loss is expected to be over 40 per cent. Unfortunately, it is not just nature that has proved unkind. The administration, according to people here, has been particularly insensitive to the problem. So enormous is the popular disquiet that over two lakh people, facing both starvation and disease, had migrated to other regions in search of a livelihood. Again, starvation, disease and migration is not uncommon in this part of the state. Every year people die of hunger and thousands flee in the absence of employment. But this year the situation is totally different. Going by the reports of hunger deaths pouring in, the final toll would easily reach a few thousand. Adding to the general misery of the people is the acute shortage of drinking water throughout the district, resulting in many, already malnourished people, being forced to consume contaminated water. An eloquent pointer to the extent of drought is the paddy yield this time. The average yield in the kharif season is around 2.75 lakh tonnes. This time it is expected to be a paltry 70,000 tonnes. The situation worsened considerably thanks to the fact that in September the district received no rainfall at all. Incidentally, only 30,000 ha out of the total 1.9 lakh ha of paddy land in the district has access to irrigation facilities. In reality, however, not more than six per cent of the land gets irrigated. Although the command area of two medium irrigation projects in the area -- Aung and Suktel -- is supposed to be around 8,000 ha, not more than 500 ha were provided with water this year. Similarly, the 219 minor irrigation projects in the district hardly irrigated 3,000 ha this time since the reservoirs were almost empty. Bolangir's tragedy is that the State Government did precious little to create facilities for irrigation as a priority programme in view of the drought being a chronic problem. This is a crucial omission given the fact that the people here depend solely on agriculture for their subsistence. Somewhere there is a lack of political will to resolve the drought problem in this region. Successive state governments seem to have accepted that drought and the impoverished condition of the people are a fact of life. The State's inability to cope gets reflected in public opinion. There is the overwhelming feeling here that no governmental measure can reverse the situation. It's not as if there is a shortage of drought contingency plans. There have been numerous recommendations on how the State Government should fight drought in the region. But rather like Humpty Dumpty, all the king's horses and all the king's men can do little to put this region back on its feet. What comes through is the lack of governmental will to put into action long term programmes designed to ward off these recurring crises. The moot question here is: why does this zone fall in a rain shadow area, and why is drought spreading to previously unaffected regions? The most obvious cause is the drastic reduction in forest cover in western Orissa. According to some estimates, not even 10 per cent of the original forest cover of the area remains. Even the most casual visitor to Bolangir today can notice the indiscriminate and unchecked felling of trees that is going on here. Once famous for its teak and saal trees, today there are hardly any forest patches in the Bolangir, Nuapada, Bargarh and Kalahandi districts. The rapacious timber smugglers, who have constantly enjoyed the patronage of ruling politicians, continue to destroy forests with blatant disregard for the law. They go unpunished even as the once fertile land is rendered barren. Sadly, although the State Government admits that the mindless felling of timber has contributed to the present situation, precious little has been done to stop it. As former legislator of Kantabanji, Prasanna Kumar Pal, points out, Kantabanji, Kesinga and Titlagarh -- the three urban centres in Bolangir -- is ridden with timber smugglers. Ironically, since this region has rich deposits of precious stones and Kantabanji is the gem capital of eastern India, it has also attracted gem smugglers. With drought being endemic in the region and the economic backbone of the poor tribals shattered by years of exploitation at the hands of non-Oriya businessmen and officials, thousands of the unemployed prefer to migrate to Raipur, Hyderabad and other cities. This has, in turn, resulted in a thriving business in ``labour export''. The large-scale migration that took place this year, for instance, has come as a boon to contractors in the neighbouring cities. Sinu Bagarti, of Balpadar village, however, points out that many out of the over two lakh that migrated have since returned, as the labour market outside seems to have reached saturation point. All these developments are indications that something is terribly wrong in the drought-ridden regions of western Orissa. Yet a callous administration is still to wake up to its implications and seems more intent on shirking responsibility rather than tackling it on a war footing. The flow of drought relief funds is too meagre to make much of a difference. The J.B. Patnaik government, on its part, does not appear too concerned. The revenue department is yet to fully assess the losses and present a case to the Centre for extra assistance. The public distribution system is in a shambles. There are just no funds for undertaking labour intensive work to prevent mass migration. The old, indigent and widows have not been paid their monthly dole of Rs 100 per month because of the lack of money. It seems that there is no prospect of Bolangir's misery ending. If things are bad now, they will be nightmarish in the months to come.