Stranded in snow for 8 days & still counting

Three of her five children are suffering from pneumonia. There is no doctor, just a small chemist’s shop to dispense both medicine and advice. ‘‘We take the medicine that the chemist prescribes,’’ says Rafiqa.

Try telling her that she is fortunate and she will flare up — as she did at a tehsildar in our presence. But there is no getting away from it. Of the 3,000 passengers stranded at various points along the 300-km long Jammu-Srinagar National Highway, Rafiqa Sheikh and her family must count among the lucky ones, simply because they have a choice to return to Jammu, though the journey is not easy. The worst-hit are those who are caught between two landslides, cut off from the world, freezing and waiting for the roads to clear.

Sheikh and her family waited for a few days, not wanting to retrace their steps towards Jammu. And now they are running out of money.

Some 16 km away, at Panthal, on the other side of the landslide, are some 1,600 stranded people. Some have moved into the homes of villagers but there aren’t enough homes to accommodate them all. Many spend their nights in the cramped vehicles they were travelling in when the rocks came crashing down.

News of these people comes only from those who have ‘‘escaped’’. That is tougher than it sounds. The hardier folk decided to risk a trek of at least three hours to bypass the rocks and reach Ramban, from where they will take a bus to Jammu.

Those with young children and the elderly have no choice but to remain where they are. Mohammad Ismail, a 60-year-old businessman from Srinagar, is an exception. But now he can go no further.

Ismail says that he was at Banihal for a day and remained stranded for three days at Magarkote. ‘‘It took me five hours to trek down to Ramban,’’ says Ismail. But now his legs have turned numb and his fingers are suffering from frost bite after several hours of walking through snow.

The cold weather has piled on the agony. Banihal witnessed its maximum snowfall of the season during the past few days, when people were stranded. They now lie huddled inside school buildings, community centres, the tehsildar’s office and even with some Army units.

At the 25-bed primary health centre, some 50 people have squeezed in—not to seek treatment but take shelter, says Dr Sameer Abdullah at the PHC.

They are all looking towards the sky in the hope that Air Force helicopters will come and carry them away to safety. Instead, all they get is rainfall and snow flakes, which prevent the choppers from landing.

Meanwhile, the authorities offer words of encouragement. Amjad Pervez Mirza, SP Traffic (Highway), says that the Jawahar tunnel has been cleared and the road to Panthal will be also be unclogged soon.

B S Jamwal, the Ramban tehsildar, speaks of the community kitchens that have been set up and the 400 blankets that have been distributed. But for thousands, the nightmare continues.