Acute water shortage in South Gujarat district 100 km from Narmada: HC seeks reply

Tribal village in Chhotaudepur district

Taking serious note of acute water shortage in South Gujarat’s Chhotaudepur district, which is less than 100 km from the Narmada dam-reservoir, and the high-profile Narmada canal passing by less than 50 km away, the Gujarat High Court has issued notice to the Gujarat government to reply back by July 20 on what is being done to mitigate the situation.
Issued to the Gujarat chief secretary, the water supplies secretary, and the district collector, Chhotaudepur, the notice is in response to a public interest litigation (PIL) filed with the chief justice seeking urgent intervention to provide Narmada waters to the predominantly tribal district, which has experienced extreme water shortage and drought this summer.
Filed by Gujarat’s well-known Dalit rights NGO Navsarjan Trust, the petition says that though the Narmada dam is situated “at a distance of less than 100 km” and the Narmada canal passes by less than 50 km away, the district is facing “acute shortage of water”, with the state officialdom refusing to lay canals to provide waters to the needy villages.
Calling it a clear case of “discrimination between citizens”, the petition says, the state government has been spending “crores of rupees to provide Narmada water to far off places in Saurashtra and Kutch, but does not make any effort to provide water to Chhotaudepur, which has a majority tribal population.
Pointing out that the issue of acute shortage of water was brought to the notice of the state government as also the local administration by a local NGO, Adivasi Kalyan ane Vikas Manch, way back in March 2015, the petition says, more than 10,000 tribals had gathered in a rally and a memorandum was submitted to the district collector.
The memorandum talked of lack of “irrigation facilities, non-functional hand pumps, damaged roads resulting in government vehicles not being able to reach the villages to repair the pumps etc.”, the petition says, adding, though the 871 villages of the district have 18,372 hand pumps, in the financial year 2015-16 the local authorities “received complaints of non-functioning of 9,418 of them.”
“When more than 50% hand pumps require repair in less than one year, it speaks volumes”, the petition says, adding, “The deputy engineer has stated that on an average they receive 200 to 250 complaints per week. This would mean that annually 10,000 to 12,000 complaints.”
Pointing out that while state officials claim they are making “efforts” to resolve the issues, the petition says, “it is worth mention that the state authorities found time to reply to the Collector on the issues of tribals after nearly 10 months of the submission of representation.”
Meanwhile, the petition says, this summer, there was no water in Orsang river, the 13 lakes dried up, the Sukhi dam had not waters, the wells were dug up even deeper, and the hand pumps stopped functioning.
Further, the petition says, the plans to build check dams in Kavant taluka in several of the villages –Amalvant, Singla, Zer Jamli, Nalej Harvant Singla, Zer Jali Nalej, Harvant Jogpura Khadi Raipur, Bhabhar, Kundanpur, Dhanya, Dhanya, and Linda Tekra – were not implemented.
And, while the state government, in 2009, prepared a group water supply scheme, at Hafeshwar for Rs 64 crore, it remained a non-starter for the 180 villages of Kavant and Pavi Jetpur talukas, which were to benefit from it. Even today the scheme has not commenced.
Things went so bad this April, says the petition, that groundwater tables went gone down up to 400 feet, and government and private bores were to dug up to 500 feet.
Even those colonies, where the Narmada displaced were rehabilitated, such as in Sankheda and Bodeli talukas serious water crisis took shape, yet the authorities supplied only one tanker water “as against requirement of at least 4-5 tankers per day”, it says.

Comments

Ahmedabad's civic chaos: Drainage woes, waterlogging, and the illusion of Olympic dreams

In response to my blog on overflowing gutter lines at several spots in Ahmedabad's Vejalpur, a heavily populated area, a close acquaintance informed me that it's not just the middle-class housing societies that are affected by the nuisance. Preeti Das, who lives in a posh locality in what is fashionably called the SoBo area, tells me, "Things are worse in our society, Applewood."

RP Gupta a scapegoat to help Govt of India manage fallout of Adani case in US court?

RP Gupta, a retired 1987-batch IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre, has found himself at the center of a growing controversy. During my tenure as the Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar (1997–2012), I often interacted with him. He struck me as a straightforward officer, though I never quite understood why he was never appointed to what are supposed to be top-tier departments like industries, energy and petrochemicals, finance, or revenue.

PharmEasy: The only online medical store which revises prices upwards after confirming the order

For senior citizens — especially those without a family support system — ordering medicines online can be a great relief. Shruti and I have been doing this for the last couple of years, and with considerable success. We upload a prescription, receive a verification call from a doctor, and within two or three days, the medicines are delivered to our doorstep.

Powering pollution, heating homes: Why are Delhi residents opposing incineration-based waste management

While going through the 50-odd-page report Burning Waste, Warming Cities? Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Incineration and Urban Heat in Delhi , authored by Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran of the well-known advocacy group Centre for Financial Accountability, I came across a reference to Sukhdev Vihar — a place where I lived for almost a decade before moving to Moscow in 1986 as the foreign correspondent of the daily Patriot and weekly Link .

Environmental report raises alarm: Sabarmati one of four rivers with nonylphenol contamination

A new report by Toxics Link , an Indian environmental research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi, in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund , a global non-profit headquartered in New York, has raised the alarm that Sabarmati is one of five rivers across India found to contain unacceptable levels of nonylphenol (NP), a chemical linked to "exposure to carcinogenic outcomes, including prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women."

Dalit rights and political tensions: Why is Mevani at odds with Congress leadership?

While I have known Jignesh Mevani, one of the dozen-odd Congress MLAs from Gujarat, ever since my Gandhinagar days—when he was a young activist aligned with well-known human rights lawyer Mukul Sinha’s organisation, Jan Sangharsh Manch—he became famous following the July 2016 Una Dalit atrocity, in which seven members of a family were brutally assaulted by self-proclaimed cow vigilantes while skinning a dead cow, a traditional occupation among Dalits.

Tracking a lost link: Soviet-era legacy of Gujarati translator Atul Sawani

The other day, I received a message from a well-known activist, Raju Dipti, who runs an NGO called Jeevan Teerth in Koba village, near Gujarat’s capital, Gandhinagar. He was seeking the contact information of Atul Sawani, a translator of Russian books—mainly political and economic—into Gujarati for Progress Publishers during the Soviet era. He wanted to collect and hand over scanned soft copies, or if possible, hard copies, of Soviet books translated into Gujarati to Arvind Gupta, who currently lives in Pune and is undertaking the herculean task of collecting and making public soft copies of Soviet books that are no longer available in the market, both in English and Indian languages.

Boeing 787 under scrutiny again after Ahmedabad crash: Whistleblower warnings resurface

A heart-wrenching tragedy has taken place in Ahmedabad. As widely reported, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane crashed shortly after taking off from the city’s airport, currently operated by India’s top tycoon, Gautam Adani. The aircraft was carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members. As expected, the crash has led to an outpouring of grief across the country. At the same time, there have been demands for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Venkaiah Naidu. The most striking comment came from BJP MP Subramanian Swamy, who stated : "When a train derailed in the 1950s, Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned. On the same morality, I demand PM Modi, HM Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Naidu resign so that a free and fair inquiry can be held. All that Modi and his associates have been doing so far is gallivanting, which must stop." Amidst widespread mourning, some fringe elements sought to communalize the tragedy. One post ...

Revisiting Gijubhai: Pioneer of child-centric education and the caste debate

It was Krishna Kumar, the well-known educationist, who I believe first introduced me to the name — Gijubhai Badheka (1885–1939). Hailing from Bhavnagar, known as the cultural capital of the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, Gijubhai, Kumar told me during my student days, made significant contributions to the field of pedagogy — something that hasn't received much attention from India's education mandarins. At that time, Kumar was my tutorial teacher at Kirorimal College, Delhi University.

Search This Blog