Ghorahi, April 12
Two settlements of Yadav and Tharu communities caught fire in Dang district on Monday. The flames rendered 60 families homeless.
First, the fire engulfed the Tharu settlement. Ram Das Yadav, who was grazing buffaloes nearby, rushed to the scene to extinguish the blaze. At that time, he also saw other people from his community putting out the fire.
While they were extinguishing the fire at the Tharu village, the Yadavs were unaware of what was going on in their village, half-a-kilometre from the Tharu settlement. Only later did they come to know that their village, Khajrauta, had caught fire and houses and sheds had gone up in flames.
Yadav laments, “Everything went up in flames, we could not taken anything out of the house.”
Most of the villagers, who had rushed to the Tharu settlement to extinguish the flames, suffered a similar fate.
In Khajrauta alone, 30 houses and 13 cowsheds turned to cinders, Acting DSP Prakash Raj Sharma informed.
On Tuesday, a committee formed to rescue disaster victims decided to provide Rs 6,000 to each affected family as immediate relief.
But on Monday, the victims had to stay hungry, out in the open.
While on Tuesday, FNCCI (Dang) distributed food to the victims.
There was no human casualty in the incident. Chief district officer Dipak Kafle estimated the fire losses at Rs 10 million. Smoke was billowing from the affected settlements as of Tuesday morning. Local people were busy extinguishing the fire with water.
