Bhubaneswar, October 28: Orissa’s Panchayatraj Minister Surendranath Nayak recently made yet another promise to the victim's of last year's super-cyclone: If 50,000 houses for those whose lives were blown away by the cyclone are not completed by July-end, I will quit, declared the minister.If Minister Nayak had meant it, he would have relinquished his post long ago. Not only has he not quit, but Orissa's super-cyclone victims are still waiting for the promised roof above their heads. A year after the super-cyclone rammed the Orissa coast and rewrote the lives of thousands forever, the government's efforts have been too little and too late.As many as 20.7 lakh houses were either washed away, fully collapsed or partially damaged. Of these, nearly eight lakh houses belonged to people below the poverty line (BPL). However, only 27,353 houses have been completed under the Indira Awas Yojana (IAY). According to Nayak, 70,000 houses are under various stages of construction and will be completed in a month or two.The first batch of beneficiaries under this scheme was selected as late as May this year. If the previous Congress government took its own time in getting a grip of the situation, the Biju Janata Dal-BJP government needed two whole months after coming to power in March to settle down.It's been too long a wait for people like Kanchi Bewa, a 58 year-old widow in the Sahada village of Erasama block. Bewa got Rs 19,000 from the IAY, with which she could build only four pillars of her house. The panchayat is yet to release the rest of her allotment, a princely Rs 3,000. She is not sure whether the house can be completed with this amount.Another villager, Makar Samal alleged that the panchayat secretary has been collecting Rs 250 for releasing work orders for the IAY house. Apart from an error-ridden BPL list, the lottery system has left out many deserving persons from getting work order for IAY houses.Thousands of families in the cyclone-hit areas are living under the open sky as they have no money to reconstruct their houses. It's worse in Erasama, where entire villages were washed away.To cover up its poor performance, the State government is now taking the line that construction was delayed because of inaccessibility of the affected villages in the aftermath of the cyclone and an early monsoon in May this year.Different departments also have different things to say on the same issue: while Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik says the selection of beneficiaries for the second phase would be over by mid-November, minister Nayak cites December as a deadline.There are also too many fingers in one pie: while the Panchayatraj department is responsible for ensuring houses to the BPL families under the IAY, the housing department is disbursing loans to the BPL families under the HUDCO loan scheme. Due to this duplication in work, some families have cornered HUDCO loan as well as IAY houses, while a majority have been left out of both.
