Noida students trekked to safety

A group of seven students, fighting all odds, reached their homes in Noida after a ten-day ordeal in flood-ravaged Uttarakhand on Tuesday night. The students claimed that during the distress, they received no help from state authorities.

With little food and no warm clothes, the group walked continuously for four days before they were airlifted by the army. A group of 23 people from Noida left for Uttarakhand on June 13. At Gangotri, seven of them decided to continue their journey and go to Tapovan, while the rest decided to return. Once they reached Tapovan, the group faced the fury of the Uttarakhand floods that left more than 1000 dead and many more missing.

The group alleged that rather than helping the victims, the state authorities were more concerned about evacuating Gangotri and its nearby places, sending people away to other places without telling them about how to go ahead. “The officials just kept telling us to move to other places, they were not concerned if we reached a safe place. They just wanted us to leave so that they can claim to have evacuated the place,” said Yutika Agarwal. “We were helpless; the only thing that kept us going was our will to survive.

We walked day and night, stopping only when one of us fainted,” recounts Somya Mittal, a 23-year old commerce student. “For ten days we survived on biscuits and water. We rationed our food and drank from the streams, even when we knew that the water could be contaminated,” said 20-year-old Sonali Agarwal, the youngest in the group. The state administration and police was in complete disarray and many of the police stations were locked.

“We thought of approaching the police at Bhatwari but the police station was locked. We were told that there are camps set up along the road and free food is being distributed, but, we did not find any such thing,” said Somya. The group believes that they were lucky as they had money with them, without which escape would have been impossible. “We had some extra money and that saved us. I shudder to even think of those who had no money,” said Sonali.

“There was was no fuel to run vehicles. Those meant for clearing landslides were also lying unused,” said Yutika. There reached a helipad at Harsil, but with thousands of stranded people, the army was prioritising on lifting the old and the sick. “We did not receive any help at Harsil and walked for another day to Sukhi.

But here too, there were many people,” she said. The ten-day ordeal finally came to an end at Bhatwari, where four of them were airlifted to Chinyali and then to Dehradun. The rest further trekked from Bhatwari to Chinyali, from where they took a bus to Dehradun. “From Dehradun, we we took a bus to Delhi and reached on June 25 evening,” said Yutika.