Dharali: Hope lies buried, as search for life in a ghost town continues

Some are searching for their loved ones; others for signs of their vanished homes, sifting through the mud and debris by hand. Some are pleading, photo in hand, to at least find a body to match, so that the last rites can be performed. Others stare into the void with hopeless faces, eyes brimful of tears over the utter devastation of their lives and futures.

Meanwhile, relief teams continue to work, removing the debris by machine and by spade, manually — but it is an excruciatingly slow process. It could take months to dig up anything buried under the tons of silt and rubble.

This is the scene at Uttarakhand’s Dharali, on the foothills of the Himalayas, which faced the wrath of nature on 5 August when the water swept in from high in the mountains, bringing with it soil, stones, trees, shrubs — and snuffed out the village.

A search for life is on, but it is difficult to say whether it will be fruitful. A report in the Dainik Bhaskar said that a week after the incident, only two bodies have been recovered — that too of those who were above the debris and swamp. Nothing has yet been found in the rest of the debris and soil spread over about 80 acres.

According to a Dainik Bhaskar report, even those residents who have survived are unable to guess where the main market, shops, hotels and restaurants used to be. All lie smothered in the clayey blanket. They say the flood came so fast and quick that they actually saw houses being shifted several metres away. One house has shifted about 200 metres from the village bounds itself.

The same news report says that some houses are still left standing in the upper part of Dharali. A temple there was the site for the Har Doodh fair on 5 August. The fair was attended by many villagers — which probably saved their lives.

One such survivor is Chahat Dawan, a Class XI student. Her house is damaged, her small 5-room temporary homestay, apple orchards and fields lie interred. She is scared. There is nothing left here for her, and she can only hope the government helps resettle her elsewhere, somewhere she can eke out a new beginning.

Then there is Mahesh Pawar, whose ancestral home was in Dharali. At least 15 other families lived around his house. At the time of the disaster, Mahesh was at the Har Doodh fair. He survived, but his home lies demolished, his belongings sunk beneath the rubble of the neighbourhood he grew up in, the courtyards and streets of his childhood erased.

As of now, no official death toll has been shared, neither any account of the value of the damages. But media reports from newspapers and news channels that managed to get a correspondent over have shared terrifying tales of destruction — and neglect.

The government, these correspondents allege, is busy with ‘media management’ again, trying to portray through news agencies like ANI and PTI that relief and rescue work is continuing apace, highlighting how many people have been rescued and the number of people taken to safe places or relief camps. But there is an eerie silence on exactly how many lost their lives, how many were injured and where they are, how many houses were wiped out, how many shops and hotels and orchards disappeared, how much lies lost — in effect, now, underground.

Relief and rescue work in Dharali over the last eight days has focused on finding and retrieving bodies. Due to lack of road connectivity, big machines have been unable to reach the spot for digging and smaller machines keep getting stuck in the wet soil. Therefore, sadly, much of the digging is actually being done by hand.

Immediately after the disaster, two bodies were found — but they were in fact on the surface. Not a single body has, in fact, been recovered by those fruitlessly and painstakingly digging away in the dirt. The biggest obstacle in the excavation work is the presence of large rocks within the blanketing layer of earth. According to an estimate, the river dumped rock and earth, silt and sand, about 30–40 feet deep over about 80 acres.

One report shows that even as the few machines that somehow reached Dharali manage to move a little of the piled earth, wet mud and rubble immediately flow in to replace what is displaced.

On the other hand, Madhavi Parade Ground, a temporary camp just a few kilometres away, trembles under the whirring rotors of government helicopters. The work of bringing up people stranded in Dharali and then sending relief into Dharali is being coordinated from here. But a report from Goenka Award-winning senior journalist Hrdayesh Joshi, who is reporting from the ground for Newslaundry, says that among those rescued, there is not a single native resident of Dharali — only tourists or those who were in Dharali on some other work have been brought to the camp site.

Joshi says, based on his conversations with people from Dharali, no information is being shared on what is happening there, nor is anyone willing to say who is receiving the relief materials supposedly being distributed. Naveen, a local resident, says he wants to go to Dharali to find out about his loved ones, but he is being denied entry on some pretext or another. Bindu, also from Dharali, is looking for her brother and brother-in-law. She says she is neither being any information about her relatives, nor being taken to Dharali to see for herself.

Eight days since the disaster, road connectivity is yet to be restored to Dharali — hence the ‘taken’. According to estimates by the local people, at least 60 are missing, many of them labourers from Bihar, Jharkhand and Nepal. Relatives and friends from Nepal, among others, have been seen running helter-skelter, looking for their loved ones, clutching their photographs.

But only the roofs of some three-four storey houses can be seen in Dharali. Everything else lies buried. The first floors of some houses are choked with debris. There is no way in but over.

Ashish Anand of News Laundry is another correspondent who has written a first-person eyewitness account of the devastation en route to Dharali. The Uttarkashi–Gangotri highway is in ruins. Destroyed roads, wounds in the hillside left by the landslides, broken bridges — all bear witness to the wrecking ball of Nature that passed through.

But the people, they continue to wait — wait for the state government to release data on the missing persons, to find their dead for their last rites, to tell them where to go and how to pick up their lives again.

On the sixth day after the disaster, district magistrate Prashant Arya formed a probe committee under the leadership of the SDM. It was to file a report on the numbers of missing, injured and dead. The report is still awaited.

As for relief and rescue operations, 125 personnel from the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF), Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), Army and police and administration officials are working together at ground zero. NDRF commandant Sudesh Kumar told the Dainik Bhaskar, “All available technology and machines are being used, including ground penetrating radars, rescue radars, victim locating cameras, rotary rescue, thermal imaging camera and hydraulic split cutters.”

Cadaver dogs too have been deployed.

But so far, the next of kin of those missing survive with dimming hope and a prayer on their lips.