wait for water

April 11: A cricket bat was used as a sledgehammer in a brawl over water today. Rajesh Verma, an assistant of an insurance surveyor, was hit on his head when he got into an altercation with an ITI employee and his two sons over drawing water from a well.

A seriously injured Verma was rushed to the hospital and later he lodged an FIR at the Sukhdeonagar police station in Ranchi.

Reports of violent clashes have started pouring in from different parts of the state. With the mercury soaring and the wells drying up, the brawls have started early this year, claimed the police.

Last year, a middle-aged man was stabbed at Harmu following an altercation over water. And in Hindpiri area of the capital city, a man was shot dead after his nephew had a quarrel with neighbours about who would draw water first.

There is little the police can do, said the officers in charge of Dhurwa, Hindpiri, Argora and Sukhdeonagar police stations, save patrolling the areas in the morning and later in the afternoon.

Long queues of people with buckets, utensils and plastic cans are commonplace, they point out. Often frayed tempers get the better of irritated people who come to blows.

?We are still not witnessing water riots,? said one of them, ?but the situation this year certainly appears worse than the previous years.?

There is a strong whiff of corruption in the air because people are raising questions about the crores of rupees claimed to have been spent on water supply schemes. L.K. Advani, the then deputy Prime Minister had launched an ambitious Rs 100-crore water supply project in Hazaribagh three years ago. In the coal belt, too the government had started a project worth Rs 110 crore for augmenting water supply in Dhanbad and Katras.

But both the projects have witnessed time and cost over-runs and water shortage in both the places have acquired alarming proportions. The situation in the countryside is especially bad with wells drying up and most of the tubewells allegedly developing snags.

Officials, however, claim there is nothing to worry about. Hazaribagh district officials said a four-member team had been constituted in every block, led by a junior engineer, to identify malfunctioning tubewells and repair them. Village committees, they said, had been authorised to spend money for cleaning up wells and repair tubewells.

Dhanbad deputy commissioner Beela Rajesh conceded that the situation was alarming but claimed that as many as 70 tankers had been pressed into service to deal with the situation.

The efforts, however, are clearly not enough as indicated by a telling photograph which showed women collecting water dripping from a truck, laden with sand dug from the river-bed. The steps taken by the officials also indicate the gravity of the crisis.

Beela Rajesh, in fact, informed that a letter of no-objection has been received from the Union coal ministry, that would enable the district administration to treat water pumped out of coal mines.