A village in Bhagabanpur, East Midnapore. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

June 21: Floodwaters have started receding from the affected areas of the two Midnapores, but hundreds are still stranded on rooftops and trees in at least eight blocks, waiting for relief to arrive.

A 70-year-old man died on the roof of a club without any treatment, and a family remained stuck in their house without food as the administration struggled to cope with the crisis.

The floods have affected over 22.5 lakh people across 31 blocks of East and West Midnapore and tens of thousands have crammed into makeshift camps where food and drinking water are scarce and other basic amenities are almost non-existent.

Nearly 14 hours after Debendranath Panda slipped into waist-deep water from the roof of a two-storey building in East Midnapore’s Manikjorh village, none from the administration came to the 70-year-old’s rescue.

Panda, a farmer, had a mud house in the village, around 175km from Calcutta. It was washed away.

Along with 50 other villagers, his family had climbed onto the roof around 10 on Thursday night. On Friday night, the old man fell into the water, injured his head and became unconscious.

Panda’s son Susanta, 35, and some villagers picked him up and took him back to the terrace as others requested block development officer Surjya Jana for a boat to take him to the primary health centre.

But Jana pleaded helplessness, saying no boat was available and that the primary health centre was also under water. The nearest place where Panda could have been treated was Contai Subdivisional Hospital, 35km away.

Through the night, Panda lay unconscious as his family huddled around him. “The only thing I could do was to check his pulse. In the morning, I found he was not breathing,” Susanta said.

A boat sent by the BDO did arrive around 2pm today, but to carry Panda’s body to the subdivisional hospital.

“I got hold of a boat only this afternoon,” Jana said.

Those stuck on the roof have so far survived on puffed rice and water arranged — not by the government — but by the club.

Himangshu Kamila, 42, a peon at a private firm in Calcutta, had pleaded with block officials to help him rescue his wife and children. The ground floor of his two-storey house in Angar Beria, 3km from the relief camp at Bhupatinagar, is under water since Thursday.

“I returned from the city yesterday and had to swim to reach my house,” he said.

His wife Urmila, 35, son Ranjit, 8, and daughter Arpita, 14, had by then exhausted their food and drinking water.

“I requested the BDO and other officials to rescue them but nothing has been done so far,” he said.

A mob today surrounded Manas Bhuniya, the Congress MLA from Sabong in West Midnapore.

Kalipada Das, 72, of Durulia village in Sabong, 150km from Calcutta, said: “We’ve been surviving on wet rice, which we had in store. But it will be exhausted in a day or two.”

Sanjib Raul, 40, who runs a small shop at Dehati village in Sabong, has been living on a road with wife Sunita and two sons — Prosenjit, 15 and Biswajit 12 — since Wednesday, when their single-storey house collapsed.

BDO Jana said: “Our resources are stretched. There are harrowing tales from across the district. But it is simply not possible to reach out to everyone.”