A long walk to fetch water across Bundelkhand’s bone dry villages
BHOPAL/SAGAR: Twenty eightyear-old Nanhi Gond looks ruefully at the handpump, fiddling with its lever — just in case. But the tap is bone dry, just as it has been for the past two months.
It’s 2pm, and an unforgiving sun is beating down on the village of Bilhata, where the temperature is in high 40s. Gond, and five members of her family, join a queue of residents from the village, plastic pots on top of their heads, and begin a two kilometre-long journey deep inside the Panna Tiger Reserve. The timing is important. For the villagers of Bilhata compete for the two buckets of water they each seek; not with other people, but with Panna’s wildlife.
Census 2011 puts Bilhata village’s population at 513 people, of which the majority are tribals. There are only two handpumps in the hamlet. By April 15 this year, both went dry.
Thakurdin Adivasi is next to Gond as they walk wearily to the pond.
“Earlier, this crisis of water would come in May and June. But this year, we have been doing this since the beginning of April. There is no rain; the situation is dire,” he said.
The body of water the procession is heading towards is no well, and has no fresh water. Locally called a “jhiriya”, it is a pool of stagnant, muddy water.
“The jhiriya is a pond that the wild animals drink from too. It is the only source of water for kilometres around. Which is why the timing is important. Early in the morning, or later in the evening, wild animals collect at the pond to drink.
“When they laze in the afternoon is when we go to collect our water. We may die of thirst. But the least we can do is protect our children from being attacked by animals,” said Gond.
This daily fight for drinking water is not limited to Bilhata, but is symptomatic of a deepening crisis in the villages of Madhya Pradesh, particularly the arid Bundelkhand region, where a harsh summer and the lack of rain has been characterised by dry taps, long queues, in the limited sources that do exist, and in some places, death.
Numbers behind the heat
Though some parts of the region have benefitted from the Jal Jeevan Mission, a Union government programme started in August 2019 that envisions individual drinking water taps across households in India by 2024, the villagers in Bilhata say that they are yet to see its effects.
In Panna district, data from the mission states that only 15.93% of households have tap connections, the lowest in the state. Overall, the data shows that of 12.2 million households in the state, 5.03 million have access to clean tap water.
An April 2022 report from the Madhya Pradesh Public Health Engineering (PHE) department on water availability in the state said that of 51,000 villages, the groundwater level in 13,000 was critical. These villages are solely dependent on the transportation of water, said Malay Shrivastava, additional chief secretary, PHE.
A November 2021 report by the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) also raised broader concerns about the state, flagging that the groundwater decreased in 34% of the wells, the secondhighest reduction in India after Rajasthan, which recorded a 59%.
The fall was noted in comparison with the decadal (2011-2020) mean water level in November. In Panna, the dip in the water level of wells was as high as 72%, the report said.
Manvendra Singh, state convener of the Jal Jan Jodo Abhiyan,
a social organisation working to tackle the water crisis in the Bundelkhand region, said, “A major drought hit the Bundelkhand region in 2016 after a deficit of rainfall for two straight years and a recovery has not happened. This water crisis also leads to crop failure.”
Singh pointed to the uneven rainfall in the state during the 2021 monsoon. While Chambal and Gwalior saw a strong season, Bundelkhand’s Damoh received 35% deficit rainfall, Panna 33%, and Chhatarpur 24%. “If monsoon fails in this region this year too, the problems will increase because of the incredibly harsh summer.”
So far, things are not looking good for 2022. India Meteorological Department (IMD) data of cumulative rainfall shows that, till June 1, Tikamgarh and Panna did not get a drop of rain, as against a normal of 7.7mm in the month of June, while Chhatarpur, Damoh and Sagar showed a deficiency upwards of 90%.
“This summer has been very harsh. Places like Nowgaon and Khajuraho in Chhatarpur district, Khargone, Sidhi, Rajgarh, Gwalior, Datia, and a few others, have broken their heat records. Nowgaon and Khajuraho touched 48 degree Celsius three times in May alone,” PK Saha, scientist at IMD, Bhopal.
The scarcity has started to take a toll. In the past two weeks, at least eight people have died in incidents that can be linked to water shortage. On Sunday, three minors in Raisen, drowned in a well which they had gone to in order to draw water to bathe. Rajkumar Bairagi, a father of one of the three children said, “The water crisis is responsible for his death. All the handpumps are dry, so even the young have to go to the well to draw water.”
In another incident on June 3, two people died in Narsinghpur district after consuming contaminated water from a pond — much like the one the villagers of Bilhata draw from — and 28 others were admitted to the district hospital with stomach pain. “There was a rush of patients complaining of the same stomach pain symptoms. It was because they had all consumed contaminated water from a local pond,” a doctor from the district said, asking not to be named.
The struggle for survival
Across villages in rural Madhya Pradesh, the battle for water has taken various, even if tragically familiar, forms. In Kurkutka village of Sheopur district, Rajesh Adivasi says almost the entire village of 640 people now walks two kilometres in the searing heat to fetch water from a dirty pond. This same pond is used by the cattle in the village.
“The village does have hand pumps and wells but they have all dried up to a major extent. We have to stand in queue for hours to fetch water at the few that have a very limited amount, and most times we come back empty handed. So all of us now walk to get muddy water. We have met the authorities about 10 times, but nothing happened,” Adiwasi said.
Government officials admit that Tikamgarh and Sheopur, in particular, are places of concern. In a video conference on May 26 and 29, chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan asked the PHE department, the Jal Nigam, and district officials, to look into the crisis in these two districts on priority.
Chouhan told officials at the meeting that migration from Tikamgarh because of shortage of water was a cause for concern, and that it was a priority to find a solution to these issues by 2024.
In Chhindwara, the 200 residents of Virdha have begun storing pieces of cloth to use as a makeshift filter while drawing water from a dirty pond in the vicinity.