Seventy-year-old Ganesh Prasad Yadav starts wading through knee-deep water even as a group of men try to dissuade him from going any further.

“It is very dangerous. You won’t be able to reach your village. The water level is close to six feet and the current is very strong,” they tell him.

Yadav is unmoved. He is not going home but to the village where he got his daughter married. The village, on the border of Purnea and Madhepura districts, is completely marooned and hundreds of people are stranded. “My daughter has two little children. I have to rescue them at least. I cannot wait indefinitely for the government boats to reach them.” He ignores the advice of people that he won’t be able to bring back the children even if he is able to reach the village.

“I will bring them back on my shoulders,” he says.

Just 200 m behind him are jawans of the National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF), the men who are in-charge of the rescue operations and who would have to evacuate people from Yadav’s daughter’s village as well. But that village is not their priority today. They have to send their boats to some other villages which have been marooned for over ten days now.

Though there are about eighty people of NDRF stationed at Bagha Chandpur, nearly 70 km west of the Purnea district headquarters, they have only six functional motor boats. The number is less than the villages falling under their area where thousands of people are stranded over roofs of a few cemented houses.

... contd.