
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday, August 2, announced that the party will build more than hundred houses for the landslide victims in Wayanad. The former Wayanad MP who is overseeing the rescue operations stated that the present focus should be on finding the bodies, finding missing people and rehabilitation of the survivors.
Rahul Gandhi, along with his sister Priyanka Gandhi, arrived in Wayanad on August 1. They visited relief camps and the affected areas to take stock of the situation. A meeting was organised between the authorities and the Congress leaders, in which the number of casualties expected, and the number of houses damaged were discussed.
Speaking about the devastation in Wayanad, the Congress MP said that Kerala has never seen such a tragedy in one particular area. “We have said that we are here to help in anyway possible. The Congress family would like to commit to build a hundred plus houses here. I am going to raise the issue in Delhi and urge the Chief Minister to treat the issue differently. What a lot of the survivors have told me is that they do not want to go back to that area. They should be rehabilitated in safer areas and not forced to go back,” said Rahul Gandhi.
Rahul Gandhi also said that he was going through the same emotions he felt during the death of his father Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1991. “I remember what I felt when my father died and here people have not just lost a father, they have lost the whole family. So I know what I felt and this is much worse than that and it's not one person who's feeling it. It's thousands of people who are feeling it. There is still a lot of work to be done here. But it is a huge tragedy. I would like to thank all the people who are working here, the doctors, the nurses, the administration, and the volunteers. I am very proud of everyone who's working here,” he added.
More than 280 people have been killed and around 200 people are missing in the devastating triple landslides that hit Wayanad in Kerala on July 30. Nearly 6,000 people have been rescued and more than 8,000 affected people have been relocated to relief camps.