Bengaluru: Despite being the main catchment area of River Cauvery, Kodagu is not unfamiliar with water shortage during summer months. This year, the district administration’s move to restrict irrigation to ensure the availability of drinking water has triggered a water war. “Farmers in Kodagu use stream water for irrigation only for two months in a year, how can the district administration ban it?” asked farmer leader Manu Somaiah on Friday, during a protest in front of the deputy commissioner’s office.
“Such a step will kill our crops while resorts are allowed to waste water throughout the year,” says Somaiah.
The water crisis hit headlines over the last two weeks after Bengaluru finally woke up to dry borewells and a shortage of tankers, nearly six months after Karnataka declared 223 taluks as drought-hit. Meanwhile, farmers, frustrated with the water crisis, raised an outcry when the price of chillies they had struggled to grow in the burning heat, crashed overnight last week.
While the state stands in wait of monsoon, which is more than two months away, water levels at Karnataka’s 23 reservoirs are at 131 tmcft on March 15. This is 56 tmcft less than the previous year. A crisis seems to be looming. Live storage at the Krishnaraja Sagar has dipped to 6.34 tmcft, similar to water levels during the drought of 2016-17, raising questions about what has been done in the past eight years to avoid a repeat crisis.
Several government schemes have been implemented to ensure tap water supply to rural areas in the event of such crises. In fact, a senior official in the rural water supply department says the problem has been mitigated due to these central and state schemes. “The data on the water supply schemes will show that we have made significant steps towards providing safe drinking water,” he says.
As per the Union Ministry of Jal Shakti, 75% of 1.01 crore households in Karnataka have been provided with tap connections. The assets have been geotagged to monitor the progress of the scheme. However, there is no direct answer as to how many of them actually carry water.
Data shows that Karnataka has 40,300 piped water supply projects in 31 districts. Though work orders have been issued for 38,231 works, only 3,315 (8.67%) have been “physically completed” while thousands of projects are at various stages of completion.
The delay has led to a struggle for survival, especially for those on the margins of rural communities. For instance, residents in the Asthana tribal haadi (tribal hamlet) in Virajpet taluk of Kodagu district are facing a drinking water crisis. The residents of the haadi are forced to collect water from sources that are far away.
A permanent solution is still a distant dream for residents. “Some have to walk more than half a kilometre to fetch a pot of water from a public well,” a resident told DH.
The resident of the haadi adds, “After several appeals, now the gram panchayat has taken up the work on laying a pipeline to the hamlet to supply water and the work is in progress.”
Many of the projects in progress include multi-village supply (MVS) schemes, with lakhs of households waiting for the promised water. “The water will not come,” an adviser to the government told DH, “At least not for the next two months.”
“The schemes depend on either borewells or rivers, both of which have gone dry. There is no sustainable source to ensure the taps will bring water to avoid a crisis situation,” he added.
In the Kittur-Karnataka region, villages that do not have any water source are in dire straits. Officials who relied on borewells to pump water have been disappointed by the harsh drought. Depletion of the groundwater table has made the supply of water impossible.
This is visible in the seven districts of Kalyana Karnataka where the temperature is hovering around 40 degrees Celsius and where rivers have run dry.
Out of 1,268 borewells present in Kalaburagi, 357 borewells have become defunct. The district administration has attributed the depletion of groundwater levels to the drought.
District administrations in the region have identified hundreds of villages that may face water crises in April and May. Officials have identified private borewells to supply water to the villages.
As groundwater levels deplete, high fluoride content in water poses a threat to human health. Fluoride (31 districts) and arsenic (3 districts) contamination have made RO plants necessary in Karnataka. Reverse Osmosis (RO) plants installed by the government remain defunct in many villages, while some do not have RO plants at all.
The administration in Belagavi has claimed that 39 villages are staring at a water crisis and alternate measures like supplying water through tankers have been taken up. Of the…