Bihar Floods: Relief is the Need of the Hour

by Thakur Vikas Sinha

Aug 14, 2007

Friends:

Our state Bihar has been reeling under very severe floods for the last several days. United Nations has called it the worst floods in South Asia in living memory. Over ten millions of a crore of people have been affected by the flood. River waters have breached embankments at several places and flooded thousands of villages, forcing scores to flee their homes. Road and rail communication has been severely impacted. People have lost their belongings. Standing crops over thousands of acres have been washed away. It is going to take quite some effort for people to pick up their lives. In this hour of need, let us come forward and contribute our bit for the flood affected.

We talked to people who have worked for relief and have been told that temporary shelter, potable water, common medicines besides food grains are needed for immediate relief. Of the various techniques used for rendering water potable, we have found that filtration followed by chlorine treatment is the most cost effective way of getting potable water. A tablet of chlorine, which contains about 45 mg, is good enough for 25 litres of water, or the average consumption of a family for one day. Taking the cost of filtration and chlorine, it is possible to provide a family with potable water for less than 15 paisa per day. One can expect that water from natural sources would be fit for drinking after roughly thirty days. Thus it is possible to keep a family free from post flood water borne diseases for less than Rs Five!!!

Some of us under the banner of One Bihar have decided to launch a relief program in Kalyanpur and Gaighat blocks, two of the worst affected areas in the floods. We have decided to focus on potable water. Our friend Chandan Singh is already in the field training people in the use of chlorine tablets and distributing chlorine tablets in the villages.

We have managed to build a small kitty to buy the provisions. You may also wish to contribute to the same by transferring your donations to ICICI bank account # 002001019947 (Rajiv Vidyarthy, Powai Branch, Mumbai). Please mention your name in the comments (will help us to track) and send an email with the transfer details to this email address . We will send you a confirmation for the same. We will follow a very transparent system of accounting which will be available on line at for public scrutiny at this link.

A frequent update of the relief work will also be made at this page.

One Bihar Team:

Atul Kumar (IIM Ahmedabad, AVP, Genpact, USA); Rajiv Vidyarthy (IIT Delhi, IIM Lucknow, Mumbai);Chandan Singh (Executive Director, GreenPower), Patna;Tanya Prasad (Mumbai);
Saroj Kumar (Project Manager, based in USA);Samir Kumar (Research Student in Australia);
Ajit Chouhan (Business Partner, Infosys), Bangalore; Naveen Sharma (IIT Kgp, Program Manager, Cisco), Bangalore; TV Sinha (XLRI, Sr VP, Polaris), Mumbai; Mayank Krishna (Marketing Manager, Pidilite), Mumbai; Vivek Kumar, NCR Corp Hyderabad; Ashok Sharma, Hyderabad.

PatnaDaily.Com disclaimer: PatnaDaily.Com is not, in any way, associated with the above group and does not participate in any third party endeavors involving public money. Please use your own discretion and judgment in participating in any such program. Mr. Sinha is a highly regarded member of the Readers Write forum of PatnaDaily.Com. His articles have appeared numerous times on this site and other web sites on the Internet and we have no reason to doubt his highly virtuous intentions. However, for legal reasons, we must clarify our stand on this issue.

We wish Mr. Sinha and his team a great success.
 

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