As you watch your dream project being washed away by the rains, look at the bright side, Mr Marandi. Your officials may be corrupt but they are honest in their corruption: they don’t spare anyone, including the Chief Minister.

A dam built under the caring supervision of Babulal Marandi at his hometown Kodaibank survived just 11 days last week. Inaugurated on June 22, it collapsed on July 3 at the first flush of monsoon. Scores of residents lost their paddy crops, including Marandi’s father, and the Chief Minister was left red-faced and fuming. ‘‘Had I not been the CM today,’’ he told a reporter yesterday, ‘‘I would have beaten them officials, engineers and contractors with shoes and chappals.’’

Officially, he has placed four engineers of the Irrigation Department, including Chief Engineer Shivaji Sharma and Superintending Engineer Baldeo Ram, under suspension. An FIR may soon be filed against the contractor-owner of the Patna-based firm, Toppers Construction Company, which had built the dam at a cost of about Rs 98 lakh.

It was inspected by Sharma and Ram as recently as June 10. On June 22, they marked the dam complete. Marandi, who used to visit the site every time he came home, rushed to Kodaibank and expressed his happiness. Hours after he left for Giridih on July 3, the rains came and washed away the dam.

No one knows exactly how many acres of crop were lost in the flash flood. But the fuming villagers didn’t wait for the government officials to come, instead they gheraoed the ancestral house of Marandi in Kodaibank and told the Chief Minister’s father, Chotu Marandi, that they wanted compensation, and fast.

They found a willing audience. Chotu, whose crop was also destroyed, says he and the other victims — including Budhu, Mangru, Tiru — should be provided seeds, besides Rs 10,000 each.

‘‘In case we don’t get compensation, we will get ruined since we don’t have either surplus seeds or the money to buy them from the market. Moreover, there is hardly any time left for planting the seeds,’’ says Tiru. Most of them are Santhals, a tribe to which Marandi belongs.

‘‘The officers and engineers eat money,’’ says another resident. ‘‘So the contractor who was supposed to mix one pack of cement with four packs of sand mixed one pack of cement with seven packs of sand. The result was the construction was too weak to bear the pressure of water.’’