Day 14

2nd May, 2011

The day was dedicated to Panchputhewadi! I mentioned in the posts before about the village. The water condition is really really bad there. They get 5 Matakas per family per day. 1 Mataka could be approximately 7 litres. So thats 35 litres of of water per family per day. Thats all they get in all for everything. I suppose we flush more water than this per day!

Jared and me went to Veruli - thats a village on the top of the hill from where Panchputhewadi gets water. Now let me try to explain the system. There are a few underwater streams that have been flowing for years. There was a drought situation in the area and the wells in the villages went dry. They were in the search of the new sources of water. They knew about the springs on the top of the hill. The government helped them in creating the boxes near the springs.

These boxes would collect the water from the spring and supply it to the village dow

nhill through a pipe. The picture shows

one of the stream boxes in the working condition. There are around 4 to 5 stream boxes with panch'vadi out of which only 2 are in working condition. Rest of them have got some or the other problem and they don't supply water to the village.

Grampari is helping the village in reconstructing those stream boxes, repairing some of them and finding a few new streams for the village. In addition to that, Grampari is also planning to do some watershed activities so that the ground water does not dry up.

Grampari stands firm on its policy that we would not help in only sucking out the water, we also

need to help in replenishing the springs. Watershed is a must thing for this system to sustain for a longer time. So we took the measurements of the spring boxes and the required pipes. I must say that it was quite dangerous. We were working on a downhill slope of the small foot tracks. The other side was quite a deep valley.

After the measurements we had some discussion with the villagers who came along with us and then the lunch. They brought for us some rotis and sabzee.

While returning, I was astonished to observe that the villages who did not have proper sanitation facilities, nor did they have even proper doors to their huts, had antenna dishes on the top of the houses. Look at the penetration these DTH service has got. Now I really do not understand, if there can be DTH penetration to this level, why not the toilets. For a matter of fact, only 21% of the rural India has access to proper Sanitation (Source: http://www.wssinfo.org).

Similar penetration is of the Gutkas. You can see the packets of Gutkas all over around even in the remotest places. I really do not understand the market dynamics here.

If private players - with the limited resources- can have a penetration at this level, why not government with a hell lot of resources! A lot of resources are available;

I learnt a lot of stories from Jared where a lot of money was being dumped into the projects of water supply and then the whole lot projects have failed. All the farmers are now in debts of crores due to those projects. And then we talk about farmers doing suicide! Come on! We need to give some thoughts on that.

-SD