Education Minister Ganta Srinivasa Rao and TDP Rajya Sabha member C.M. Ramesh were in for a surprise in the Anantapur district on Wednesday when they were on their way to the Kadapa district from the Bengaluru airport.
They were stopped by close to 100 women, with empty plastic pots on the road in the Siddaguri palli village of the Talupula mandal of the Anantapur district, who said they wouldn’t let them leave unless their drinking water problem had been solved immediately.
The Siddaguri palli village is but one of the many villages of the Kadiri, Talupula and Nambulapula Kunta mandals where drinking water has been a major problem since the last decade with each passing year only compounding their problems.
“It has been three months since regular supply of drinking water by using tankers. How do we live? What do we do to cook food when there is no water?”, questioned Manemma, a woman of the Siddaguripalli village, speaking to The Hindu .
While Mr. Srinivasa Rao and Mr. Ramesh did wriggle out of the situation by speaking to the local officials and promising the villagers that supply would be resumed and normalised immediately, the same is yet to happen. There are literally hundreds of such habitations in the district virtually spread across the district though the Yellanuru, Singanamala, Tadipatri, Pamidi, Gooty and Yadiki in the eastern part of the district besides almost all the mandals in the Kadiri and Penukonda divisons besides a few in the Hindupur division including the Hindupur mandal face heavy shortage.
Rural Water Supply (RWS) officials point that the unusually low precipitation levels at a little over 250 mm of rainfall during the last year had meant little recharge of the groundwater and the consequent plunge in the groundwater levels which have meant that water needs to transported from ever longer distances.
However, with no concrete proposals to tide over the certain crisis in the drinking water situation in the upcoming summer, the immediate future does seem grim unless special funds are made available to enable district officials to ferry water from as far as it takes.
