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Amid fresh spell of incessant rains in Uttarakhand, seven people were killed and several injured when landslides struck their houses in the hilly Pokhari area of Chamoli district in Uttarakhand early on Wednesday.
“According to our information, seven people who were sleeping in two houses in village Bhikona in Pokhari tehsil were killed in the landslides,” said a senior government official.
The Uttarakhand government on Wednesday put the number of missing people in last month's tragedy at 5,360. It announced that pilgrimage to Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri shrines will resume by September 30.
Scores of houses were damaged in the fresh landslides, triggered by overnight heavy rains. An official statement here said the Mandakini and Alkananda, which caused extensive damage during the June 16, 17 deluge, were again just below the danger level. The Ganga was flowing 2 meter below the danger mark of 294 meters at Haridwar.
Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna has asked the district authorities to take up rescue and relief operations in the area on a war-footing. A team of revenue officials and police has been sent to the area.
This is the first big incident of landslides in the current monsoon season after the heavy destruction last month in the hill state.
After rescuing over 110,000 stranded pilgrims from the Char Dham area, the Uttarakhand government is facing yet another uphill task of rehabilitating all those villages completely swept away in the disaster last month.
The government has identified 239 new villages crying for immediate rehabilitation.
Most of the inhabitants in these villages are living a miserable life as they are sleeping in open, makeshift tents, schools and panchayat bhavans and are not getting enough food and relief materials. This is in addition to the 233 villages already declared unsafe, said the state disaster and management minister, Yashpal Arya. These villages are in districts such as Rudraprayag, Uttarkashi, Chamoli and Pithorgarh, where road connectivity has been badly disrupted.
Sobla is one of the worst-affected villages in Dharchula tehsil of Pithorgarh district, where the disaster completely wiped it. “Nothing is left in this village and we cannot describe the plight of these poor villagers in words,” said Harish Dhami, a ruling Congress Member of the Legislative Assembly from Dharchula.
“Our first task is to send relief materials to these villages. But due to bad connectivity, we are facing problems,” said Arya, also the state Congress chief. Arya is not relying merely on the government machinery for the feedback. He has pressed a team of Congress leaders and workers into action to take feedback from the affected villages and help provide relief materials there.
Arya also said the government would have to put in great efforts to rehabilitate villages. “This will be our priority also,” he said.
After the 2010 natural disaster that killed 200 people in the hill state, the government had declared 233 villages unsafe. But it never showed seriousness towards rehabilitating these villages.
Even a letter written by Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year demanding necessary funds did not help much. The minister had demanded Rs 50 crore to shift these villages, most in districts such as Chamoli, Rudraprayag, Bageshwar, Uttarkashi and Pithoragarh, which bore the brunt of the recent floods.
The fragile geo-morphological and tectonic set-up of Uttarakhand, with high precipitation, make the state prone to frequent natural hazards, experts said. “With uncanny regularity every year, the state sees heavy losses due to landslides and flash floods during monsoon. These incidences result in permanent loss of agriculture lands and infrastructure, besides adding to instability of slopes, further increasing the probability of landslides and land subsidence,” said Bahuguna.
