C T Online Desk: Flood victims of north-eastern Bangladesh, particularly poor farmers, fear that a worse time than living in submerged homes or in subhuman conditions in flood shelters lies ahead for them as they lost almost everything valuable to the latest monsoon deluge.
Considered the worst in decades, the latest deluge in June came on the heels of the flash flooding that began in early April, officially affecting nearly 50 lakh people in the north-eastern haor region and washing away homes, fisheries and livestock farms besides damaging standing crops.
Nearly four lakh flood victims were still at government shelters on Tuesday, mostly in Sylhet division, 12 days after the deluge hit.
Meanwhile, thousands returned home as floodwater receded over the past couple of days, witnessing for the first time the extent of devastation and losses in flood-affected areas, particularly in Sylhet and Sunamganj districts, which were completely overtaken by floodwaters at the peak of the deluge.
Triggered by the rush of water following days of extreme rains along the vast mountainous terrain in the upstream, the latest monsoon deluge reduced villages to rubbles, leaving behind mere poles of corrugated iron sheet-roofed and mud- or bamboo fence-walled houses or battered roofs resting on poles.
Farmers returned to find their houses buried in tonnes of mud, which the floodwater carried from hills, where soil erosion and pollution escalated due to deforestation and mining, leaving them faced with days of work to get this huge volume of mud removed.
The deluge also left the agricultural value chain in a mess by damaging almost all country roads and many metalled ones and highways. Agriculture is the economic lifeline of the haor region.
Still, the most frightening of the losses was the washing away of foods such as rice and potato stored by the subsistence farmers of the haor for feeding their families until the next boro harvest almost a year from now.
‘I have no idea how I am going to repair my house and feed my family in the coming days,’ Takbir Hossain, a resident of Towakul village of Gowainghat, Sylhet, told New Age.
After spending 10 days at a flood shelter, Takbir along with six other members of his family returned home on Sunday, to discover his bamboo-made house missing all of its walls and buried in knee-deep mud.
Takbir also discovered that all he had left behind in his food store — 50 kgs of rice in a sack and some 1.4 tonnes of paddy — was washed away in the flood.
Rashid Ali, a farmer of Hatirkhal village of Purbo Jaflong union of Gowainghat, returned home after spending 11 days at a relative’s house to find that most of the 1.6 tonnes of potato he had left behind in store was gone.
‘Potatoes still can be found in my storage are all rotten from being under water for days,’ said Rashid.
Labourer Rais Uddin of Alir Gaon village in Gowainghat, on return from a flood shelter, found his CI sheet-roofed and mud-walled house with a stock of 41 ducks and chicken as well as the family’s clothes, furniture and kitchen utensils missing.
‘All I have now is just what I am wearing,’ said Rais.
Like elsewhere in Sylhet and other parts of the flood ravaged north-east, inhabitants of Gowainghat, a bordering upazila, where the flash flood first hit with its maximum force, could not take along any valuable things as they ran for life after the monsoon deluge hit without any warning from flood forecasters.
Bangladesh’s subsistence farmers are accustomed to storing their foods, mainly rice, in indigenous storage in which a platform, usually made of bamboos, is raised far above potential flood levels to protect these from water.
