Chennai: After battling for 12 days with rain and its aftermath, electricity was back on Saturday for 86 families residing at the housing board colony in Kotturpuram. For these residents, life is slowly limping back to normalcy. But they are grappling with the problem of picking up their life as they have suffered losses that cannot be measured or explained through words.
Many staying in this housing board complain that the owners are putting pressure on them to provide their account information for compensational benefits when approached by government officials.
“When it was our valuables that have been destroyed and when our important files and documents that have been vanished how can they come and ask us to give their account number and ration card details just because they own the house,” said 31-year-old Sumathi Mahesh Kumar, a housewife and a mother of two children.
She added that losses incurred will add up to Rs 3-3.5 lakh as most of the valuables were kept in cupboards and glass panes that were washed away in the rains that lashed on December 1st.
However, revenue officials who spoke to DC clearly stated that the compensation amount will be passed to the residents who suffered losses as the ration card and account details of the owners cannot be synchronized.
Water levels reached first floor of all the buildings in the housing board when rains lashed on December 1 and 2. Families, which resided on the first and second floor, suffered comparatively lesser losses over those living in ground floors.
“More than the fridge, TV set and other household items, it is our children’s valuable books, their prizes and valuable documents that were washed away in the floods that shook us. We have no idea as how to bring back those valuables as it is worth than anything else that we have lost,” said 32-year-old T. Malani, staying in the first floor of a settlement here and a mother of two residing in Kotturpuram housing board for the past 25 years.
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