Prime Minister Narendra Modi reached Thiruvananthapuram on Friday night and will carry an out aerial survey of the flood-affected areas in Kerala on Saturday.

This comes after the State mounted a massive, coordinated effort to rescue and rehabilitate an estimated 2.5 lakh people from more than 52,000 families displaced by one of the worst floods in Kerala’s history.

According to reports, thousands of marooned people are still waiting to be airlifted or taken by boat from the worst-affected districts of Thrissur, Ernakulam and Pathanamthitta.

Monsoon refugees

The ‘monsoon refugees’ have been put up at more than 1,500 relief camps after the armed forces, Central and State government agencies and NGOs went into overdrive on Friday.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said that 167 lives have been lost since August 8, with more than 120 accounted for in the last two days of flooding and landslip events.

Rains relented in most parts of Kerala on Friday after two days, allowing agencies the badly needed window to plunge into action. The Met authorities have not yet given the all-clear to Idukki and Ernakulam district and have retained a red alert till Saturday.

Elsewhere, the rains have reduced in intensity after the previous day’s depression moved away from Odisha/Chhattisgarh/Vidarbha from where it was orchestrating the monsoon over Kerala.

It has since moved to West Madhya Pradesh and South Gujarat, bringing the monsoon fury over rain-deficient Saurashtra and Kutch in Gujarat. A watch for the next low-pressure area in the Bay is on, too.

Kodagu also hit hard

Meanwhile, PTI reports that the Army has joined operations to rescue people stranded due to floods and landslides in Karnataka’s rain-battered Kodagu district, which borders Kerala.

Several districts of the coastal and Malnad regions of the State, including Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, Chikkmagaluru, Kodagu and parts of Hassan and Uttara Kannada have been facing the brunt of incessant rains in the last few days.

Comprehensive operation

Meanwhile, relief and rescue agencies mounted what they said was their toughest and most comprehensive operation in Kerala, with more men, material and equipment coming in on Friday.

There are still thousands wallowing in misery and pitiable conditions and huddled together over rooves/terraces without food or medicine and exposed to the elements.

Among them are infants, pregnant women, the aged and sick, with requests of help pouring in over social media and through media houses even as mobile phones ran out of charge.

The worst-affected places are now in Central Kerala from Chalakkudi, on the Thrissur-Ernakulam highway; the downstream suburbs of Aluva, near Ernakulam; all of Pathanamthitta, Idukki, and Wayanad districts.

A disaster management professional from Dehradun, speaking to BusinessLine on condition of anonymity, explained the unique challenges that Kerala posed for his team. What he had seen in Pathanamthitta district, a known NRI belt, with youngsters of the family away and elders fending for themselves, had astounded him. “This was quite unlike anywhere in India that we have operated," he said, alluding to the gated communities and the small plots of land where their dwellings stood.

He said his team was used to large open spaces with tenements standing few and far in between, allowing elbowroom to operate. But this was simply not possible in Kerala.

Sad commentary

There was a total lack of active men in the area who could move things on the ground; on the other hand, the elders were on their own, on the second floors or on rooftops/terraces.

Migrant labourers were the only available hands but were restrained by the fact that they were not usually allowed inside the housing complexes unless strictly for work.

“We are now convinced that neither the builders nor the house owners had factored in the threat from the nearby streams/rivulets/rivers despite the proximity to them. “This is wrong developmental planning — in the quest of assuring themselves a comfortable life under a roof, they don't factor in the role of the elements,” the professional said.

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