-Ambrish Pathak
Rains let the life flourish on planet Earth. True…?? No….not always. Sometimes it does the opposite too!!
On the fateful morning of 14th, August 2020, the clouds gathered over the sky of Jaipur, the capital city of Indian state of Rajasthan, ganged up not to shower the blessing of nature but to turn the lives of people into a living hell. Extremely heavy rainfall lashed the Pink City, wreaking havoc and caused significant disruption that brought the entire city to standstill. Flooding water inundated most of the city gushing down, specially the low lying areas damaging everything that came into its way. Within no time scores of houses and vehicles across the city submerged.
Making the situation more worst an Anicut dam, located beside low lying locality of Ganeshpuri, failed to bear the pressure of torrential rains. Over flown water crushed two adjoining sand hillocks causing all the houses, in three nearby low lying localities, cloaked with tons of massive mud. Inhabitants of these localities found themselves in such a horrible situation, where they had no means to survive. Every single stuff of their belongings such as kitchen utensils, clothes, food, money, documents and other household things were gone several feet under the stinking mud.
Amid this unprecedented disaster Swayamsevaks of RSS landed like true saviors. Rajkumar Gupta, karyavah of Jaipur City’s Paudh Shakha, tells, “We got information about the disastrous situations in these locality around 3:30 pm and our primary task was to take these people out to some safe shelter and we did it swiftly”. By 8:30 pm a community hall, located two miles away was set up into a temporary shelter, where 2800 food packets, prepared by the RSS workers families, distributed to the flood victims, he added.
Manoj Jain, Samajik Samrasta SahPramukh of Rishigalvnagar, recalls,” While local administration cleared very small portion of the mud locked roads through JCB machines, just for the formality Swayamsevaks continuously labored with simple grub ax for eight day to clear the mud from the houses of flood victims”. Swayamsevaks also established a temporary kitchen at nearby Lal Dungari Ganesh Temple to ensure uninterrupted food supply to victims and also arranged clothes, utensils and other essential stuff for them, he added and not only this, but they have also been provided with ration kits sufficient to cater their requirement for ten days.
After these eight days long rescue campaign by RSS Swayamsevaks in the worst flood hit localities mud had been cleared up from the houses and life started to come back to the normalcy. Sniffing a scope of political opportunity, some mugwump elements landed in these localities and tried to distribute food packets, which were rejected by the victims saying- “Where were you when we were crying for help?? Our true saviors are no one but these RSS Swayamsevaks in Khaki shorts!!”
Source : Sewagatha
