A little over a month after her makeshift house on the banks of the Adyar river in Chennai was washed away on December 2, 2015, Sahaya Mary was puzzled by an SMS from her bank informing her that Rs 5,000 had been credited to her account.The 30-year-old had no clue where the money had come from and headed to her bank on January 5 to check. She was told that her account had a balance of Rs 5,700 - the additional Rs 5,000 was flood relief from the government. Mary's family were also victims of the 2004 tsunami and her fisherman father lost his boat to the giant waves, but they'd waited months for the relief money then."In 2004, the compensation was distributed by party cadres and we did not get the full relief money sanctioned by the government," says Mary, a homemaker with a school-going son. "The other option was going to the tahsildar's office and standing in long queues for three days to get the money. This time, it was a surprise to get Rs 5,000 so quickly," said Mary.It's not just the beneficiaries who are surprised by the quick and hassle-free disbursement of cash - though it is a tad slower than the pace at which AIADMK cadre printed and distributed Amma stickers when relief material was sent out. Even the opposition parties - who criticized the mismanagement of water release from the Chembarambakkam reservoir, which caused the flash floods - were impressed by the government's decision to credit the relief directly into victims' bank accounts. The move cut out middlemen and erased the corruption that was rampant during tsunami relief work a little over a decade ago.In the first week of December 2015, water from the swelling rivers entered homes in several parts of south Chennai, including Nandambakkam, Saidapet, Mudichur, Nandanam and Kotturpuram. On January 4, 2016, the government transferred Rs 700 crore into bank accounts of 14 lakh families in Chennai, Kancheepuram, Tiruvallur and Cuddalore districts. This is perhaps the speediest disbursal of compensation in the country. Around 25.5 lakh households in four districts in Tamil Nadu were affected by the floods. The other households are likely to get the money on January 11.Tamil Nadu's high banking penetration has helped the government transact with ease - 87% of households in Tamil Nadu have bank accounts, and in urban areas like Chennai all families have one or more bank accounts in public or private banks. "Nearly 80% of the affected households in the four districts had bank accounts. We opened accounts for the remaining 5.1 lakh households under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana," said a senior government official.It's a model that other states that are affected by natural calamities could emulate. In Odisha, for example, which has been hit by floods or drought every year, victims get relief only through taluk offices. "We send a cheque to the district collector and then money is sent to each and every taluk. The victims have to go to the taluk offices and collect relief," said an official of Odisha Disaster Management Authority. All donations to the chief minister's relief fund in Odisha are done through banks. "We ask all donors to deposit the money into the chief minister's relief fund account and then disburse the money via cheques to the collectors," explained the official.The AIADMK government has moved fast and its relief efforts as well as its work to check the outbreak of epidemics have come in for praise from Central teams, but whether the victims were really soothed will only be known after the elections later in the year.