A Visit to Bambarada Village, Puri District

Dear  Members,

I have always enjoyed talking to villagers and finding out how they are doing and how all our development interventions are impacting them in terms of improvement in the quality of their lives. Today it was one more opportunity for me to reconnect with them in Bambarada village of Satyabadi block in Puri District in the company of Dr Rajiv Sinha (IIT Kanpur), Dr Sushma Sagar (AIIMS), Mr Anil Mishra (WRD, Govt of Odisha), Pratap (RCDC), Malika & Murali (UN), Mr Jena, and others .

 

Bambarada is one of the waterlogged villages, which we were visiting as part of the Gender Community’s learning event to understand the coping strategies of people in areas that face waterlogging as well as programme interventions that may be facilitating to make communities resilient.

 

The struggle for survival and live a reasonably decent life for the people of Bambarada centres around water, too much of it in certain months of the year and too little of it in the remaining months. Interventions have been made by the State Government to reduce water logging in the rainy season but optimum results can be achieved if micro-level initiatives with greater involvement of people could be dovetailed to the meso-level projects of government, may be, with a credible NGO playing the facilitatory role. Incidentally people of this village appear to have little faith in the Panchayati raj institutions. I would view it as our failure to build PRIs as genuine institutions of decentralised governance.

 

I was pained to see people using contaminated pond water for cooking and cleaning purposes and brackish water(of unknown quality!) for drinking purposes. Added to this is near absence of toilet facility in homes. People understand the priorities, but are resigned to the status-quo. Can this state of affairs be changed ? If yes ,how and when ?

 

Best wishes,

Dr. Aurobindo Behera
Formerly with Government of Odisha