The Silk City of Brahmapur is reeling under severe water crisis amidst the current heat wave. Half of the areas of the city, more particularly the areas of Gandhinagar, Ramanagar, lanjipalli, Khodasingi, Badakhemundi Street, Dalua Street, Military line, Hill Patna and Cooperative Colony, are experiencing acute water crisis.
Hundreds of women with empty vessels on heads have to move to nearby ponds and dug-wells to collect water for their families’ daily requirement.
The PHD Engineers are worried as the water supply from the three deep ‘collector wells’ has come down to 10 MlD (million litres per day) from the designed supply of 30 MlD.
As per an estimate, the city requires 60 MlD whereas it hardly gets 30 MlD from all sources such as collector wells, open canals and localised tube-wells. Due to the fall of water level in the Rushikullya river basin, discharge from collector wells has suddenly dropped from 16 MlD to 10 MlD during last three days.
According to reports, the dry condition of the Rushikulya riverbed has created similar water problem in several other areas of Ganjam district like Aska, Kabisuryanagar and hundreds of villages in the periphery.
Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, a couple of weeks back, inaugurated the second water storage tank for Brahmapur and the Government claimed that the water supply provision to the city would increase by 20 per cent, but people’s experience seems to be quite different.
When asked about the measures taken by the department for improvement of routine water supply in Brahmapur, PHD Executive Engineer Ashok Mohapatra said that at present 1,217 tube-wells are functioning under the jurisdiction of the Brahmapur Municipal Corporation.
The department is receiving, on an average, eight to ten complaints per day about nonfunctioning of tube-wells, which are being immediately attended to by staff divided into two units for the purpose.
Besides, he said supply of drinking water through tankers is also being made as and when required. The department is going to construct 16 new tube-wells within May this year to meet the scarcity of water in the city.
The regular use of high-powered electric motors by consumers, preservation of surplus water beyond requirement in wells by some consumers and frequent power-cuts by the Southco are the key reasons for the current shortage of water in the city.
The department is now contemplating to educate the public not to waste water and to refrain from such unlawful wastage, he added.
Former Assembly Deputy Speaker Rama Chandra Panda, who has been spearheading a movement against water crisis in the district for four decades and championing the issue of Rushikulya-Mahanadi linking since 1986 has strongly demanded immediate implementation of the rivers’ linking project, which has now been approved by the National Water Development Agency.
This would ensure an uninterrupted flow of water in the Rushikulya riverbed for percolation of groundwater to prevent a water crisis of present magnitude, he has stated.
Had the Government constructed a check-dam on the riverbed by strengthening the riverbanks, the collector wells would not have gone as dry as it is today, he added.
Panda said the perception that the proposed river linking would eventually flood Rushikullya is rubbish.
He pointed out that a section of people of the Mahanadi belt are agitating against sparing Mahanadi water for other basins. In fact, the proposed Mahanadi-Rushikulya river link would be helpful for human and cattle populations of Ganjam district while its en-route would help cultivation of more than one lakh hectares of land in three districts, Nayagarah, Khurda, and Ganjam, he added.
In addition to this, as an interim measure, the State Government should sanction the Janibilla-Dakshinpur pipe water scheme to augment water supply to Brahmapur city, for which, the Government had made an agreement with the Civil Society on January 29, 2011, he suggested.