KalingaTimes Correspondent
Kendrapara (Orissa), May 11: In a show of community participation, residents of a cluster of perennially backward seaside pockets in Orissa's Kendrapara district have successfully rebuilt a two-km-stretch saline embankment to prevent frequent intrusion of tidal waters, all by their own endeavour.

Cut off from the mainstream, around 40 natives of Mangalpur, Gokhakhati, Deulpada, Kumbarpada, Gojabandha, Barakanda, Akhadasali, Dadhipur, Sathiebati and five other coastal villages encountered the permanent cup of woes like flooding of seawaters as the government-made saline embankment was abysmally ill-maintained.

Crisscrossed by rivulets, water-inlets and innumerable creeks, most of the localities are hamstrung by abysmal lack of communication. Since past four years, there was promise only but no work by the government's saline embankment personnel to plug the seepage points of the embankment. There was periodic incursion of tidal water from the sea ravaging the agriculture fields.

There was little that people could to do to stem the crop loss on a yearly basis. In fact the paddy cultivation had come to a grinding halt in these areas badly affecting the agro-based economy of the region, according to former Mahakalpada Panchayat Samiti chairman Balram Parida.

The locals in a show of community empowerment and solidarity resolved to do what the government willfully forgot doing. The residents of these clusters of 14 villages later took up the unique venture and have begun the task of repairing the all-important embankment, leaving behind years of governmental apathy.

A comprehensive plan was chalked out and discussed in the village panchayats. With the panchayat bodies not responding to the project in right earnest, people volunteered to lend assistance for the project. Once the first donation of Rs 1,000 came from a villager serving as an employee in the state government, the dream project got a kick-start.

Voluntary donation invariably from all the households poured in and swelled to Rs one lakh. Then the work for the novel project commenced about three months back and at present it's complete enough to stop the ingress of tidal waters, said Sapan Das, an unemployed graduate from Akhadasali village.