Volunteers serve food to flood victims at the Banmankhi relief camp in north Bihar. Picture by Deepak Kumar

Banmankhi, Sept. 5: For Jeevan Gupta, charity is a way of life.

So when the floods hit Bihar, the trader who also runs a shelter for the homeless in Purnea’s Ghulab Bag, wasted no time to get going.

With the government machinery still in disarray and rescuers from the armed forces yet to arrive, Gupta and his fellow traders from Ghulab Bag are a rare source of succour for the thousands living in relief camps.

“We have set up a cell that collects relief material and manpower to carry out relief work among the marooned people,” Gupta said.

The trader has been visiting three camps on the Purnea-Banmankhi-Murliganj-Madhepura highway almost everyday, along with two trucks loaded with food.

For the first 13 days since the Kosi breached an embankment, Gupta and his band of good samaritans were the only people carrying food to the camps. After that, help began trickling in from across the country and the world.

Now, along with the traders’ trucks and tractors, their smarter versions belonging to Unicef and Oxfam, laden with food and clothes, queue up outside the camps. Vehicles sent from various states, including Punjab, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, are also on their way.

But the people at the relief camps are most grateful to the traders. “It would have been hard for us to survive had they not got food for us,” said Jugal Kishore Das, who stays at the Bhangaha relief camp.

“We have no complaints about food now. We are getting enough,” said a villager at the Saharsa relief camp, which had seen violence over relief material about a week ago.

There seems to be a problem of plenty at the Banmankhi relief camp, with packets of rice, dal and vegetables, brought by a Sarva Shikhsha Abhiyan van, lying untouched.

But if there is abundant food at the camps, lack of sanitation and drinking water facilities are adding to the misery of the homeless villagers.

“We have no toilet facilities,” said Upendra Ram, a resident of the Bathnana relief camp. There are four toilets at the camp, on the Araria-Forbesganj highway, but with over 3,000 takers, Ram and many others never get to use them.

Ram says he is slowly growing used to the stench that fills the air around him.

The number of hand pumps in Bathnana, too, is a dismal four, forcing most people to drink the dirty floodwater.

“The state administration has neither the will nor the infrastructure to cope with the sudden displacement of lakhs of people and the rush in relief camps,” said Ravindra Kumar Yadav, the principal of AU College in Murliganj, who has taken shelter at the Chandpur-Bhangaha relief camp with his family.

Officials of the state public health engineering department, who are supposed to set up toilets and hand pumps, are hardly seen at the camps, Yadav said.

Jainarayan Yadav, who stays at the same camp, echoes him. “We are afraid that soon an epidemic of the worst type will hit these relief camps that are operating under terrible conditions,” he said.