A complaint has been lodged against an engineer deployed at Chyangli VDC to collect the electronic data of quake-affected households.  

Engineer Arjun Sah, deployed by the Centreal Bureau of Statistics, asked for a bribe while collecting data from quake victims, four villagers said in a joint complaint filed at District Administration Office (DAO) a few days ago.  Engineer Sah, however, denied the allegation.  

Former Chyangli VDC Chairman Homnath Pandey claimed that engineer Sah demanded Rs 15,000 from each household through a local health worker. There are 1,099 households in the VDC. “The engineer had intentionally excluded us from the housing reconstruction aid,” said Pandey, adding that the DAO is not paying attention regarding the matter.  

Meanwhile, some of the enraged villagers, who have been left out of the aid list in Taple VDC, padlocked VDC office on Friday demanding the inclusion of their names. VDC Secretary Ghanashyam Dhakal said the VDC office could not work due to the disputes. There are 1,228 households in Taple VDC. 

The National Reconstruction Authority (NRA) has made public the names of 58, 250 quake-affected households for the aid in the district. The NRA has already completed the aid agreement with the quake victims of 26 VDCs and Palungtar Municipality. 

“A total of 10,731 households have registered complaints at the District Development Committee about being left out of the aid list,” said Chief of District Technical Office Sahadev Bahadur Bhandari, confirming that they had received complaints from each of the VDCs and the municipality. The National Census of 2011 shows there were 66,516 households in the district. The VDCs had provided 66,144 red ID cards to the quake-affected households. “It took 13 months to collect the data. However, there are still many problems,” Bhandari said.