As soon as the horn of the food truck blares, children and women rush to form a queue to collect their meals near flood relief camps in Delhi, where several families displaced by the rising Yamuna are staying.Strips of cloth tied to ropes stretch across the middle of the camp, serving as makeshift drying lines, while piles of salvaged belongings and plants uprooted by the floods lie scattered in corners.“We face a lot of trouble here at night because of the mosquitoes. Even the food we get mostly has rice. For those who have a fever, how will they manage to eat only rice?” said Shanti, a resident of Yamuna Khadar.Ram Kishan, a farmer, said his family has been left with no means of livelihood after his crops were destroyed. “All my fields have gone under water. This year’s entire harvest is gone, and my family completely depended on it,” he said.A walk through the Mayur Vihar Phase I relief camp showed how people are trying to hold on to whatever they could save.For Poonam, the mother of a six-month-old baby, the struggle is of a different kind.”Living with a small child like this, under the open sky, is very difficult. There is no privacy, no comfort and we are constantly worried about the baby’s health,” she said.
Utensils, mattresses and wooden cots were placed along the roadside. Some children played nearby while elderly men sat in groups, talking about the loss they had suffered.
Another resident of Yamuna Khadar, Rajesh, said the floods have left him with nothing to return to. “My house is still under water and most of my belongings are gone. I had borrowed money for repairs last year, and now everything is washed away again. I don’t know how I will repay the debt,” he said.In the makeshift shelters, inadequate facilities and poor sanitation have left people vulnerable to infections, water-borne illnesses and vector-borne diseases, raising fears of an outbreak.At one of the largest relief camps in Mayur Vihar, a tent marked as a medical unit stood nearly deserted. A small bag of medicines lay unattended, with no staff in sight. Civil defence volunteers claimed a separate facility had been arranged for healthcare, but residents said little help was available. Apart from inadequate medical support, the camps have little by way of basic sanitation. Toilets are few, forcing many to rely on open defecation, further compounding the risk of contamination. However, the water level in the Yamuna river at Delhi’s Old Railway Bridge receded to 207.31 metres at 8 am on Friday, a day after reaching the season’s highest at 207.48 metres.
