Uttarakhand: Ripped apart, stitch-back begins slowly

SC orders all-out rescue efforts in UttarakhSRINAGAR (UTTARAKHAND): It was hard on Shiru Singh when the waters first came on June 14. Last year's rain had eaten off part of his roof and he was hoping sales from his small electronics shop in a slightly awkward corner of Srinagar town would be enough to stop the constant nagging of his worried wife.

"Just you see," she would wail. "We will drown next year." They survived. But the cloudburst of the next day that has left, according to some estimates, more than 150 dead, 60,000 stranded and thousands missing across Uttrakhand, took away everything else. Covered in mud and carrying a steel jar, Shiru on Thursday said that was all that could be retrieved. "I will keep looking, though. Whatever little I find, it will help me rebuild the house."

It will take a long time for the lives hit in one of Uttarakhand's worst natural disasters be rebuilt. In the absence of roads, many of which have dissolved into the Ganga, Alaknanda and Bhagirath, rescue will be slow and rehabilitation torturous. In fact, the government is not even thinking about loss to property and infrastructure. Or about the dead. The single-minded focus right now is to bring to safety those who can be saved.

So, five days after the devastating storm, the people of Uttarakhand have begun doing what they can to pick up and bring together the pieces of their disrupted existence. "We can't wait for the administration to come to us," says Dinesh Tomar, 30, looking listlessly at his house with the front and back walls blown away. "I lost a bike too."

It's better that way. It will be months, if not years, by the time some compensation will trickle to him and countless others still recovering from the sheer force of the calamity. Talk to people here - it takes about 2 hours and 30 minutes to reach Srinagar from Rishikesh these days, a fairly risky road that cuts through mountain rubble and needs landslide-negotiating skills - and they will often look heavenwards in a show of both prayer and penance. "When do you think these men will be fine?" asks Budh Singh Athwal, a police officer from Pauri. "Look around you."

The devastation is brutal — the sheer force so fearsome that surroundings resemble the set of some end-of-the-world Hollywood film. The imposing SSB building, with a huge dome and high, almost Greek-looking pillars, has collapsed to the ground - like a wounded horse shot through the head. The iron grill on the south lies scattered, ripped open. About a 100 feet to its left, a tower is cleaved in half, as if some great power brought down a gigantic axe on it.

A small distance away, in Bhaktiyana and Shakti Vihar, men and women are still shoveling out mud and mayhem brought into their houses by an angry river. At some places, it is 10 feet high and children walk on the roof of three-storied houses that have sunk in as if it were the regular road. The Alaknanda took with it what the rains left behind.

But Shiru will be at it again tomorrow. "My neighbor told me he might have seen the Godrej almirah my wife got with her when she married me," he says. "There are precious things in there."