As the Uttarakhand government of India wrapped up rescue work in the flood -ravaged Badrinath-Kedarnath areas, the New Delhi-based Nepali Embassy has said around 100 Nepalis are still missing in the disaster.
In Kathmandu, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Arjun Bahadur Thapa, however, said only 50 Nepalis are missing in the flash flood s that hit the north Indian state on June 16.
Among the missing Nepalis listed by the embassy are pilgrims and migrant workers, mainly from the western part of the country. Officials at the embassy said they are unsure about the exact figure of the missing Nepalis.
“We cannot say anything for certain unless the Uttarakhand government makes an official announcement on the number of deaths,” an embassy official in New Delhi said.
Meanwhile, relatives of the missing persons, who arrived in places like Dehradun, Haridwar and Rishikesh are returning home. With all hopes lost of finding their their missing family members alive, they are filing missing reports at local police stations so that the authorities can reach them should they find the dead bodies.
The Nepali embassy said it is still receiving calls from relatives of missing persons from districts like Salyan, Rukum, Rolpa, Dang and Jajarkot. A majority of these callers are looking for their relatives, who were working in Uttarakhand.
As Nepal and India share an open border, there is no knowing how many Nepali workers and pilgrims were caught in the disaster, how many survived and returned home, or how many are still missing .
Some of the missing Nepalis had reportedly reached Mumbai and Himachal Pradesh after surviving the incident, but that does not suggest the number of missing persons will be any less, Pushpa Raj Panday of the Haridwar Nepali Community said. “There are chances that the number of missing Nepalis could be two-fold more than what has been reported so far.”
Acting Nepali Ambassador to India Tirtha Raj Wagle said the embassy has been providing Rs 2,000 each to the survivors of the flood ing to travel back home. The money being provided to the survivors is from the embassy’s donation reserve. The Nepal government has not provided any money to support the rescue and relief of Nepalis in Uttarakhand.
The famous Hindu pilgrimage sites that once attracted a multitude of faithful is enveloped in miasma of hopelessness and desolation.
According to the estimates of the Uttarakhand government, more than 10,000 people died in the disaster, while 3,064 are missing . The government has said it will wait until July 15 before declaring the missing persons dead and begin the process of handing out compensation to the families of the victims.
Sunday 7 July 2013
http://www.ekantipur.com/2013/07/06/top-story/in-ukhand-100-nepalis-still-missing/374375.html
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