A villager picks out the few remaining unbroken tiles from his flood-smashed hut in a Sabong village on Friday. Picture by Sanat Kumar Sinha

June 20: Lack of co-ordination among the administration, outgoing panchayat functionaries and the newly elected ones has severely hampered flood relief work, especially in East Midnapore where the CPM got a drubbing from the Trinamul Congress in May.

The chief minister, who held a meeting with the district magistrates of East and West Midnapore at Kolaghat this morning, said the administration would involve both the outgoing and newly elected members of the rural bodies.

“There have been changes after the panchayat polls. But I want to make it clear that the administration will have to involve both the outgoing as well as the new panchayat members. We’ll have work with representatives of all parties,” Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said.

The lack of co-ordination was brought to the chief minister’s notice by Manas Bhuniya, the Congress MLA from Sabong, West Midnapore, who was invited to the meeting.

“I told the chief minister it was a hung situation in the villages. The outgoing functionaries are not taking the initiative and the new ones are yet to be sworn in,” said Bhuniya.

A measure of the confusion could be had in Bhagabanpur I block of East Midnapore, where gunny bags packed with some 5,000kg of puffed rice and 1,400kg of molasses were lying at the block office with no panchayat member available to carry them to the villages for distribution.

The CPM had lost eight out of the 10 gram panchayat seats in the block.

After the chief minister’s meeting, Trinamul representatives of two panchayats arrived to lift the relief materials, but not the rest.

Trinamul MLA Shubhendu Adhikary, who had also been called to the chief minister’s meeting, boycotted it.

Niranjan Sihi, the outgoing CPM sabhadhipati of the East Midnapore zilla parishad, said: “What can we do? The administration has not involved us in the relief work. How can we go on our own?”

District magistrate Anup Agarwal later called up Sihi and sought his co-operation.

At Writers’ Buildings, finance minister Asim Dasgupta met relief minister Mortaza Hossain, civil defence minister Srikumar Mukherjee, irrigation minister Subhas Naskar and senior officials to review the situation.

“The rain has virtually stopped and discharge from Galudih barrage on the Subarnarekha in Jharkhand has been cut down, but the situation is still grim,” Dasgupta said.

“Heavy rain has started in north Bengal,” he added.

A red alert has been sounded on both banks of the Teesta.

As the flood toll went up to 25, the CPM state secretariat summoned Dasgupta to ask him about the measures being taken to combat the situation.

In Kolaghat, the chief minister described the situation as “very bad”.