In Chhattisgarh a remote tribe finally strike water

Like most parts of Chhattisgarh, this village of 25 homes in the hills that dot Kabirdham district was hit by drought. The Baiga tribe, listed a protected by the state government, saw their small subsistence crops fail, and their only drinking water source, a small stream that ran down a rock face, turn into a stagnant, pungent, white film-coated pool of water. “We had to use that for everything. Cleaning, bathing, drinking and cooking,” said Jugti Bai.

[related-post]

Watch Video: What’s making news

Then in April, encouraged by Naresh Bunkar, an NGO worker with Goonj, members of every household in Pipantola began building a community well from scratch, with no help from the government.

When The Indian Express visited the village in May, they had just begun. The well was scraggly and unruly, the villagers precariously perched on steps cut on the sides. It was then about 20 feet down, and there was always the fear that the toil would come to nothing. Now, the radius is smaller and the well neater, its insides covered with cement. With the well 40 feet deep, no stairs can be used now. Instead there is a makeshift pulley for people or buckets to travel down. And at the bottom, glinting in the reflection of the sun, is a pool waist high. “Yeh humne kiya. Jis din paani pehle dikha, woh abhi bhi yaad hai,” Mishra Baiga said proudly.

They had been digging for weeks and hopes were beginning to fade. “Work was abandoned for the night,” Bunkar said. “Then the next morning, there was a small pool. The joy in the village was incredible. Since then it has only grown. Now the rains will come, and it will get filled. The fact that we struck water means the well will hold water, and will help the village next summer. Since then, we have worked even harder to cement the sides through Goonj.”

The NGO has helped dig 10 other wells in the blocks of Pandariya and Bodla and four open dugwells, and build three stop-dams, a community centre and a 3-km road. “The NGO incentivises public action by giving every worker new clothes, blankets, and household equipment. In Pipantola, given how incredible the story is, even the cement has come from the NGO,” Bunkar said.

“Officials from the district administration came several times,” a villager said. “Initially they told us that while we were doing brave work, we would find no water. We proved the sahablog wrong. Now suddenly, they have begun work on two other wells in our village.”

Dhananjay Dewangan, DM of Kabirdham, a district Chief Minister Raman Singh calls home, said work on the two wells in the village had already been sanctioned. “The work was already in progress and is now being carried out in the village. There are 1,900 wells sanctioned that are being dug all over the district and they will all be completed by June 30,” Dewangan said.

Villagers insist that the two government wells “were decided in a hurry”. “Only after we had dug our own well did the district administration begin work on these two. Both of them are far from the village, and they have not decided the right spot. The engineers asked us to work on their wells instead of our own, so even the work on our own well slowed down for a while. But now, one of the wells has hit rocks after some digging, and work has been abandoned for the past 15 days,” Mishra Baiga said.

Although the issue of not the entire village being on government rolls remains, at least some, through the two government wells, will receive payments under MNREGA. And if either of them works, there will be even more water.