SHALIGIRI (SANGAREDDY): Two girl students of Class 5 from this village wrote the recent entrance examination for Navodaya Vidyalaya at Narayankhed using a scribe.
They needed the scribe as they found that they could neither open nor close their fingers just the night before the exam.
These two girls are the latest in the list of victims of such deformity in the village. Another student of their class faced a similar problem and was facing the problem repeatedly.
School teacher Ravi Kumar helped the two girls, Sravani and Aswini, taking them in an auto to the exam centre and getting them scribes for writing their examination.
Sravani’s father took her to hospitals at Narayanakhed, Zaheerabad and Bidar and the doctors were yet to identify the problem.
The doctors suggested that the girls use calcium tablets in the meanwhile.
A visit to the village shows that the root of the problem lies in the fact that the village does not have access to potable water.
“In the past we got the water from the borewells tested. It was found to have high concentration of fluoride. The experts said that it was unfit for consumption of animals, leave alone human beings. But we are consuming the same water for more than a decade,” says Chakali Srisailam, a resident of the village. The teeth of many children and the aged had yellow mark, an indication of fluoride in the water.
Besides, the aged persons get knee pain very frequently.
Pipeline sans water
A decade ago a pipeline was laid from to this village from Borancha via Narayanakhed to supply drinking water, but nothing has happened after that.
“Drinking water problems are a major worrying factor. We are afraid that we might be going the Nalgonda way?” asks Sheri Mogul Reddy, father of Sravani.
Toranala and Irapally villages too are facing similar problems.
District Programme Officer National Health Mission (NHM) Jagannadha Reddy, visited the village along with his staff and directed them to clean the overhead tank by Monday.
He said that a medical camp would also be conducted in the village in the next few days.
