Other States - Maharashtra   

Where the funeral pyre keeps burning

Arunkumar Bhatt

Nearly 100 persons died in the landslides and the villagers are still recovering bodies

LAST RITES: The body of a person who died in the landslip in Mahad being cremated on Sunday. — PHOTO: VIVEK BENDRE

MAHAD: Funeral pyres at Jui village crematorium have been burning continuously for the past three days as more bodies of landslip victims are being recovered from under 30 feet of mud. The villagers have cremated 28 men, women and children and are waiting to recover and consign to flames 70 more.

Jui is a picture postcard village on the banks of the Nageshwari river with houses with sloping red-tiled roofs, nestled amidst green hills. But at 8 p.m. last Monday (July 25), the incessant rain caused a massive landslip. Forty-three houses in one of Jui's hamlets, Marathwadi, were crushed under tonnes of rock and earth. Its 98 residents had no time to escape. The fate of about 200 head of cattle in 27 milk sheds was no different. Marathwadi is populated by Maratha Kunbis.

But Maruti Devale, his wife Suvarna and their two children, Dipesh and Devdas, managed to rush out. "Of about hundred people, only we four survived," he says.

Jui is not the only village in Mahad taluka of Raigad district in the Konkan region of Maharashtra to be hit by a massive landslide. Dasgaon, between Mumbai-Goa National Highway No. 17 and the creek, lost 48 persons as the top of a hill crashed onto it. The landslip at Rohan, across the Nageshwari, claimed 14 lives. The villagers could save one girl there. Another village, Kondivte, lost 36 persons.

"I came out on hearing a big boom and saw a cloud of dust rising from Marathwadi," says Atmaram Dhawande, 65, a resident of Jui and a member of the Raigad District Panchayat. "Some men were saved as they were out on a post-dinner stroll. Had it happened at 10 p.m., the toll would have been much higher," he says.

"It happened in less than three minutes. If there was a little more time, more people could have survived," says Namdev Dhawande.

The Jui sarpanch, Javed Shafi, 35, who lives in the hamlet of Mohalla, which is half a km. away from Marathwadi, took a boat to reach it because of the heavy flooding. "We evacuated the frightened people on the periphery to Mohalla and the Marathi school," he says. They opened a community kitchen. A person swam across to Tandil village the next day to tell them what happened.

The power supply and telephones were out. The taluka authorities could not respond since all approaches to Jui were under several feet of water and blocked by landslides.

"We had to clear these landslides to reach Jui," says Col. Rajeev Thakur, commanding officer of 11 Maratha Light Infantry who led a 100-strong column of infantry, engineers and medical troops from Pune.

They thought they would be rescuing marooned villagers, but ended up digging out dead bodies.

The army personnel, Central Reserve Police Force and Maharashtra Police could start work only on Thursday, four days after the landslides, for want of earthmoving equipment.

Three bulldozers are clearing the rocks and mud. The bulldozers remove the mud as masked and gloved troops wait with stretchers. The villagers no longer cry. They just want to identify the bodies.

Marathwadi and Dasgaon have turned into ghost villages. The villagers do not want to live there. Mr. Shafi says the authorities have also asked them to vacate since the hill behind has developed cracks but nobody knows where to go.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Where the funeral pyre keeps burning
Mumbaikars' agony worsens
Efforts on to restore normality in Mumbai

Copyright © 2005, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu