It is not the stench of rotting carcasses and impressions of collapsed hutments and uprooted trees that the two city engineers, Ajit Phadke and M D Jagtap, have brought back after their four-day assignment, but memories of ill-clad, hungry and sick villagers chasing their jeep asking what relief material they had brought along for them.

``Water was the biggest problem for the survivors, who risked cholera, gastroenteritis, hepatitis and diarrhoea on consuming the contaminated water,'' says Jagtap, also describing his shock at learning that two people in Napang had already succumbed to cholera when they arrived.

Responding to a message from the Prime Minister's Office (PMO,) Dr R Mashelkar, director-general Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) contacted the NCL and arranged for the team to fly to Bhubaneshwar on November 13, with 300 kilos of equipment. The Regional Research Laboratory at Bhubaneshwar served as the nodal point of operations.

Weighing only 20 kilos each, and entirely hand-operated, the device proved perfect for a cyclone-ravaged area with no supply of electricity. With the slight trepidation of the risks they were exposing themselves to, since they had taken no vaccines, Phadke and Jagtap got down to business the first day of arrival, taking care to set out with their own food and water, starting at the crack of dawn and ending late night till they left on the 16th.

After reconnecting the devices and installing them within an hour at each site, the locals picked up how to handle them within five minutes, says Phadke, adding that the only obstacles to their work were the language and nearly inaccessible roads.

Back from their asssignment in the interiors of Jagatsingpur district on November 16, both Jagtap and Phadke say that they have come back with not only a sense of fulfillment that they could make a difference, but also impressions of the ``long way the relief operations still have to go.''

Dr Mashelkar says that the ``NCL is thinking of producing the devices on a large scale, with at least 100 ready by January.''