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New Delhi, 26 August. While various relief efforts have been made to reach those affected by the recent floods in India, lakhs of children continue to remain vulnerable due to the lack of a child-centred response, warned Save the Children while calling for immediate action to protect children at the same time. Since Bihar, Odisha and Uttarakhand had faced major calamities last year, the recent floods have further crippled the lives and hopes of the vulnerable communities, posing extreme risk to children.
Odisha’s major affected districts in the recent flooding are Balasore, Puri, Kendrapada and Cuttack of which Balasore, Puri and Kendrapada were among the worst-hit by Cyclone Phailin. “People in these districts were still to recover from the damage and destruction of last year when this devastating flood hit them again breaking the backbone of poor families,” stressed Chandy and said that “this was the time for sowing paddy in the fields, which the Odisha floods have irreversibly damaged.”

In the cyclone and flood-affected districts, the household kits, blankets etc. distributed last year by Save the Children have been either damaged or lost. Further, there are chronic challenges with regard to water supply (contamination), sanitation and hygiene. This has increased the vulnerability of people, particularly of the coastal communities, to contracting diarrhoea, water-borne diseases and skin diseases as they are using contaminated water for their household needs.

A consortium led by Save the Children, including CARE, TDH and Handicap International has been actively engaged in rebuilding lives after Cyclone Phailin in Kendrapada and Puri districts. However, the recent floods just after 10 months of the cyclone, inundating the whole geography have been a setback for development agencies to reach out to people and continue their work.

Save the Children had already supported 1,000 families with livelihood support, including agricultural seeds, fertilizers etc. About 80 per cent of these families which were hopeful to have a crop yield this year after last year’s loss have been again hit by a total loss of agriculture, especially in the Balasore district of Odisha.

The children who were gaining confidence and gathering themselves to continue with their studies had to be shifted to nearby villages/relatives’ homes with schools shut and Aanganwadi services stopped. The water bodies that were disinfected after cyclone have been contaminated again -- posing threat of diseases in the area. Across all the flood-affected states, the floods have had a major impact on livelihoods, disrupting access to daily wage earnings and severely affecting agricultural and horticultural livelihoods including selling and buying of staple crops, vegetable crops and cash crops.

Save the Children reiterates that unless a child-centred disaster management response is enabled in the disaster-prone states across India, the plight of children will remain unattended and will therefore place a regular burden on the central and state governments, apart from the communities and people that bear the brunt of such disasters year-after-year and which we are seemingly unable to really learn any lessons from.

Save the Children works across 16 states of India and apart from its humanitarian work, it concentrates of issues related to education, health and protection of the most marginalized children.