Erosion posing threat to Vaishnavite centre

BISWANATH CHARIALI, May 18 ? The historic Gangmouthan in Behali LAC of Sonitpur district, an important Vaishnabite centre set up by Srimanta Sankardev around 1516-1519 AD, is facing the threat of extinction due to large-scale erosion by the Borgang river. Despite erosion continuing for decades, none of the State and the Central governments has taken any concrete step to protect the holy site and the fringe villages from the wrath of the river, alleged the local people. Of late, the river has become furious since 1998 and already rendered about 50 families homeless, besides submerging hundreds of hectares of crops land of the nearby areas. Fed up with the long government silence regarding this acute problem, the local people have now begun to think that to look towards the government with the hope of getting help would mean facing extermination by the fury of the river. As a result, the local people are struggling hard to check the erosion menace by raising public funds and offering physical labour. However, according to the conscious citizens of the area, only courage, zeal and manual labour are not enough to prevent the torrential river-stream from incurring disaster. Although local MLA Ranjit Dutta has been extending cooperation and help to the public efforts, he has miserably failed to get any funds earmarked by the government for construction of guide bunds and repair of the breached embankment. It may be mentioned, the Central government announced a grant of Rs 2.40 crore in November, 1999 for the Borgang river anti-erosion scheme. But the public remained ignorant as to what had happened to the grant, or whether it was sanctioned at all. Likewise, Rajya Sabha member Basanti Sarmah granted Rs 1.40 lakh in 1998 from MP?s local areas development fund while another Rs 1 lakh was sanctioned by the Gangmouthan gaon panchayat from the funds of Jawahar Rojgar Yojana. Here also the local people remained in the dark where all those grants went to as nothing was done to save the villages from the lap of the all-embracing river. The people further alleged that though the Union Minister of State for Water Resources, Smt Bijoya Chakravorty, assured at a public meeting before the last Assembly elections to undertake a Central scheme for checking the erosion of the Borgang river, it proved to be a bombshell to lure the voters as the minister has done nothing as yet to fulfil her promise. On the other hand, the people complained, the Behali Development Block has maintained the tradition of taking up small anti-erosion schemes every year which has benefited none except the contractors. Many such small anti-erosion schemes were washed away by flash-floods and erosion before their completion in the recent past, they informed.