Brickbats Trail The Bouquets

Naveen sarkar draws flak over tardy restoration work.

- Sandeep Sahu in Puri

A month and a half after Cyclone Fani pounded the Puri coast on May 3, 15 families are still living in the primary school at Nirmala village near Pipli. Their thatched houses, blown away in the cyclone, are yet to be reb­uilt. “We don’t know where to go once the school reopens after the vacation,” says one of them. Nirmala is just one of the scores of villages in Brahmagiri, Nimapara, Balanga, Sat­yabadi and Konark areas of Puri dis­trict, where the residents, having alr­eady endured most of the summer without power, are now bracing for the rains without a proper roof on their heads. While restoration of livelihoods does take a long time, here restoration of something as essential as power is taking too long. Even parts of Puri town, the district head­ quarters, were yet to get power back even as late as June 18.