Madhopur Officials Suspended, Sand’s Heavy Burden & Cattles Missing

On 29 Aug, three days after 1,411K cusecs of water in river Ravi broke flood gates at the Madhopur headworks, Panjab Minister for Water Resources Barinder Goyal issued a show-cause notice to the firm Level9 Biz Private Limited which had been contracted for the upkeep of the structure. The company has now refuted the government’s charges, saying that 'assessing the health of the barrage’s structure was never its scope of work.' The Panjab government has also suspended the three officials under whose watch the flood gates did not open but broke down. Meanwhile, struggling with the challenge of cultivating their fields across the barbed fence along the India-Pakistan border, farmers in Amritsar’s Kakkar and Rania villages have now suffered another blow as the swollen Ravi has swallowed around 50 acres of their fertile farmland. All over the flood affected fields the huge deposits of sand is going to cause problems with once again demarcating the fields. Though there are orders from the Chief Minister Bhagwant Singh Mann for farmers to sell the sand, on ground the mining mafia, local officials, and Panjab police are preventing the farmers from clearing the fields. The farmers need not only need clear instructions but also the state's help with Joseph Cyril Bamford Excavators Ltd. , tractor-trailers, and designated dumping sites to clear fields. On 22 Sep, the Punjab and Haryana High Court allowed the Panjab government to proceed with finalizing the tenders for desilting work. Concurrently, 373 cattle have gone missing. With no carcasses found, it is now presumed that the animals were swept away by the gushing waters of river Ravi towards Pakistan. Officials in the state Animal Husbandry Department have said that of the 360K livestock affected by the floods, 534 cattle, besides thousands of poultry birds, goats, foals, and horses have died. Similarly, during the floods, there were 129 cases of snakebite in Gurdaspur district and 200 cases all over flood affected areas of Panjab in the first week of September. In parallel, due to floods in river Yamuna and Ghaggar, over 300K acres of crops have been destroyed in neighboring Haryana (earlier coverage).

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