RUKUM: Three months have passed since Hari Kumar Buda, 18 of Shyalakhadi-4, succumbed to diarrhoea, but Khali Buda, her mother, is inconsolable and wanders about talking to strangers and familiar-ones alike that her only hope for a living has gone.

Khali has been living on the edge of starvation, after her daughter's death.

''I have now become helpless after I lost my daughter,” she said, as tears rolled down her cheek.

She says she has no food on table and none to take care of.

Khali has not gotten any reparation from the government even as the government announced a compensation package for next of kin of all those who perished to diarrhoea this summer.

“Though my relatives who lost their near and dear ones to diarrhoea got the compensation, I haven't,” she said.

“My daughter's name is not in the list of deceased persons,” she said, sobbing, “Nobody came here to collect data on my daughter who left me alone.”

As she was already living in a vicious cycle of poverty, Khali had been left with little to perform her daughter's funeral rites. After the rites, she has been doubly suffering - trauma of her teen-aged daughter's death, which continuous to haunt her, and the poverty.

Local Ram Bahdaur Pun also shares a similar concern: That her daughter Koili Pun,20 lost her live due to diarrhoea but her name did not appear in the list of the deceased person and gotten no compensation yet.

“For poor like us, nobody is there,'' he said.

“If only my daughter was treated on time,

she would have survived,'' Pun said, sobbing bitterly.

Locals' estimate put the cholera and diarrhoeal toll to 35 in Shyalakhadi-4. But the District Police Office disputed it and said they have received only eight persons' names.

Meanwhile, Chief District Officer Shambhu Prasad Marasini, said they have been identifying the victim families through a mechanism developed in coordination with the Village Development Committees secretaries.

“We'll soon start the work in nine affected VDCs and put in place all the missing names after an investigation,” Marasini added.