THE question that hit the mind as one went round government health centres and cholera-affected villages in the two backward blocks of Kashipur and Dasmantpur in Orissa was: Where are the NGO leaders?
Though hundreds of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) claim to have been working for the welfare of the poor in the interior pockets of Orissa, not one could be spotted over two days on August 31 and September 1. NGO leaders, the latest coinage denoting those leading NGOs, were not visible at all.
On the second day, this correspondent saw a few volunteers of an international voluntary organisation sitting in their vehicles loaded with medicines outside the Dasmantpur community health centre. The visiting NGO team vanished soon after handing over some medicines to the local health department officials.
In Dasmantpur, where NGOs operating in the region were not found in action, the office-bearers of some political parties were playing the role of Good Samaritans. Although the Biju Janata Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party had done very little to prevent the cholera deaths, the president of the BJDs Dasmantpur block unit, Narayan Bisoi, came down heavily on NGOs.
All the 16 gram panchayats under Dasmantpur block have been affected by the cholera and diarrhoea that surfaced in the first week of July. The district administration has been trying to extend some help to the affected people during the past two weeks, but NGOs have not reached the spot so far, Bisoi said on September 1.
In Kashipur the previous day, as NGO workers remained elusive, the only person found rendering voluntary service to cholera patients at the Tikiri primary health centre was Bhagirathi Behera, a local person.
I have not brought any patient. But I have been cleaning the health centre premises and taking care of the cholera affected for the past 10 days, Behera said.
On September 4, Sanhati, a federation of 65 NGOs of Orissa, came out with a report of a fact-finding team that it had sent to the cholera-affected villages in Rayagada and Koraput. More than 250 people had died of diarrhoea, it said.
The organisation, which said its team visited the affected villages from August 31 to September 3, blamed the district administration for its failure to implement social security programmes and welfare schemes.
Maintaining a deliberate silence on the role of NGOs in such a crisis, the four-member Sanhati fact-finding team accused the district administration of failing to mobilise civil society organisations to tackle the situation. The team further claimed that there was no cholera since 1987 because of the coordination between the government and NGOs.
The district administration, for obvious reasons, was now deliberately avoiding the involvement of the NGOs working in the region to mitigate the disaster, the Sanhati team alleged.
Sanhatis allegation that the administration was deliberately avoiding the NGOs may be true. However, the NGOs, a majority of which are headquartered in the State capital, Bhubaneswar, and other urban centres, seem to be more concerned about policy decisions than being with the people.
The voluntary work of yesteryear appears to have turned into an armchair affair.
Prafulla Das
