Langaleshwar: It is only a matter of time for 25 villages under five panchayats in Balasore district to experience the same fate as that of a Satabhaya village shown in Odisha’s ace filmmaker Nila Madhab Panda’s ‘Kalira Atita’ (Yesterday’s Past) movie.
Sounding a warning bell for a dystopian future, the film shows the miseries of a Satabhaya village in the east coast of Odisha which has been swallowed by the marching sea.
“That day is not far away when over 25 villages in five panchayats such as Jambhirai, Panchupali, Bolang, Saudi and Kashaphala will be found completely submerged in the Bay of Bengal,” said an elderly villager from Balasore.
According to locals, their villages are five feet below sea level. Many parts of their villages have already been devoured by the marching sea. Now where the sea is seen was once used to be a casuarina jungle. The sea is swallowing everything inch by inch.
The project prepared by the Water Resources Department for the protection of the coast has been in cold storage for money not being sanctioned. The sea seems to be more diabolic on lunar and solar eclipses, causing more damage to the coast. Anticipating the doomsday, over 30,000 people of the above mentioned five panchayats are spending days in fear and apprehension.
“It is high time the government took corrective measures. else, acres of arable land and betel vines will be found submerged completely one day,” rued a local farmer.
In order to give protection to sand bund along the coast, the forest department had created a casuarina jungle on a vast area. But, the marching sea is swallowing more than 50 feet of this sand bund each year.
Bowing to the affected people’s repeated demands, the Water Resources Department had prepared a project of erecting a safety wall with dumping boulders with an estimated cost of Rs 11 crore in 2016.
Keeping the importance of the proposed project in mind, the state government’s 119th Technical Advisory Committee had cleared the project. Five years have passed since the project was passed, but it has not moved even an inch on the ground because of fund not being sanctioned yet.
If the coastal villages are to be saved from submergence, work on the project must be taken up on a war footing, villagers opined.
When contacted, Balasore district irrigation sub-division executive engineer Prabhas Pradhan said, “The work on the project has not been started yet because even though the Technical Advisory Committee has passed it, the fund is yet to be released.”
Meanwhile, denizens and their leaders from the area including Kartik Nayak, Adhir Kumar Mandal, Bhanu Charan Jena and Gokul Chandra Mohanty have urged the administration to find out a permanent solution to the issue that is getting more and more acute with each passing year.