SIRAHA- April 21: Lalpur is a village adjacent to the East-West Highway. Known for its vegetable farming, this village has been annexed to Golbazar Municipality in the new restructuring of local levels. Though the village has become a part of municipality, the water woes of the village has not been addressed.
The locals who were exercising to improve the living standard of the people through vegetable farming are now worried. The hand-pumps and bearing pumps installed in their arable land have started going dry. Along with the crisis of irrigation water, the shortage of drinking water has added to the worries of farmers. It’s been more than a month since the hand-pumps stopped giving water, and the wells too have started drying.
The one and only well in which around 300 households were dependent have started drying up slowly. After the well owned by Madhav Thapaliya dries up, the villagers have no choice but to bear the brunt of the crisis, said local Pramod Yadav.
Presently, the villagers are depending upon his well after other wells of the village went dry. People from across the village gather here to get some water collected throughout the night. They stand in line for hours to fill their jars. After getting some water to quench their thirst, the villagers return home. The villagers are keeping their fingers crossed, praying for reliving them from the water crisis.
In the past, there used to be timely rains, and the hand-pumps and wells never ran dry, said Jhaman Lal Yadav, a senior resident of the village. “Now it seems the nature has changed its shape just like politics,” he said. “We used to cultivate crops by looking at the sky,” he recalled the past. He complained that the rain fall has become erratic and people are forced to leave the farmland uncultivated.
Yadav, who has never read any book about environment and forest, shared his experience about the grave problems in nature invited by depleting greenery. The hills that were earlier covered with green trees and plants have been stripped bare. “The green trees have been gradually felled, we can barely see greenery if we scan the hills with our eyes,” he said.
In the past few years, the Chure hills have been massively exploited. Boulders, and pebbles, among other necessary construction materials, were quarried and supplied from here for the construction of national highways in India. Crusher industries were operated at Chure region to supply the materials. The effect of extracting stones and gravels by using JCB and excavators can be seen now. The effect of exploiting Chure has been noticed in the past three years. The underground water sources are running drying.
The shrinking groundwater recharge zone because of the unchecked mining of Chure area has spread the problem of water crisis that began from the settlements next to Chure to the southern settlements near East-West highway from this year. It has been a year that the hand-pumps and wells went dry in the settlements nearby Chure. The people of these settlements are now quenching thirsts from the river and canal.
Todke, a village at the base of Chure in Siraha, has been facing water crisis from the past three years. All the villagers stand in queue to fill water jars from an overhead tank. The locals are relying for 24 hours from the water distributed for an hour at 3 pm every day.
Not only the village of Chure base, Golbazar Municipality has also been facing a serious shortage of water from last year. After the hand-pump ran dry, the locals dug a pit to push the pump deeper. The pump couldn’t pull water even after digging a 15 feet deep pit and installing 100 feet pipe, according to Pramod Yadav of Golbazar.
Ram Prasad Yadav of Lahan said last year he dug a 15-feet deep pit to install the hand-pump. He said they used a motor pump to pull the water earlier, but since the past 15 days the water has run dry.
According to Underground Water Source Office Lahan, there was a good layer of water below 40-60 feet under the ground surface. But now the water layer can’t be found even 100 feet below the earth surface, the office added.
PHOTO: MITHELESH YADAV
