CHENNAI: The power is back in the city and all seems normal except the piles of tree logs on the roadsides. But just little far away from the capital city, for the people living on the fringes of the society, it is much more a struggle to come back to what they can call normalcy.
Hardly one km from the Poonamallee bus stand, 54 Narikuravar families in Amma Nagar are still struggling to build again the makeshift arrangements that are their homes.
“Without electricity, we were unable to sleep because of the mosquito menace and fear of other insects also entering the house. We stayed awake most of the nights,” says Priya, a 10-year-old girl in the community as her parents were busy tying around tarpaulin sheets in an effort to restore their house.
The houses in this Amma Nagar are all built by either fragile cement walls with asbestos sheets as roof or the plastic sheets double as walls in most of the houses.
For at least three days after the cyclone, the families were left with no power and water. The water tanker lorries that supply drinking water to them could not reach the area heavily filled with wooden logs.
But the biggest nightmare for these families was what many of us would consider mundane – defecation.
“We don’t have toilets and usually walk two km to relieve ourselves in a remote area. But with no power on those days, it was pitch dark in the night and we could not walk. So we have to defecate right next to our houses itself,” says S Silk, who is in her early 30s. She need not explain how embarrassing it would have been, besides the obvious hygiene hazard.
In the same locality, during the last year floods, a five-year-old boy Ravi died when he slipped into a lake where he went to relieve himself. “Despite a child’s death due to lack of toilets, nothing changed even a year later,” says Ravi’s father Ramesh (35).
“The Narikuravas make a daily living by earning `200 to 300,” says Y Arul Doss, an activist of National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) and who works closely with these people.
The tale is almost the same with another group of Narikuravas living at Arul Nagar in Sriperumpudur.
They got back power only on Thursday evening. But more than power, the big worry for days was lack of food with the cyclone destroying much of the things in the house.
“At least during the floods (last year), the officials visited and provided with us with relief materials. But this time, nobody has even visited the area,” says Kaniappan, a resident of the Arul Nagar.