Long walk to water across Bundelkhand’s bone dry villages

Census 2011 puts Bilhata village’s population at 513 people, of which the majority are tribals. There are only two handpumps in the hamlet. By April 15 this year, both went dry. Thakurdin Adivasi is next to Gond as they walk wearily to the pond. “Earlier, this crisis of water would come in May and June. But this year, we have been doing this since the beginning of April. There is no rain; the situation is dire,” he said.

The body of water the procession is heading towards is no well, and has no fresh water. Locally called a “jhiriya”, it is a pool of stagnant, muddy water. “The jhiriya is a pond that the wild animals drink from too. It is the only source of water for kilometres around. Which is why the timing is important. Early in the morning, or later in the evening, wild animals collect at the pond to drink. When they laze in the afternoon is when we go to collect our water. We may die of thirst. But the least we can do is protect our children from being attacked by animals,” said Gond.

This daily fight for drinking water is not limited to Bilhata, but is symptomatic of a deepening crisis in the villages of Madhya Pradesh, particularly the arid Bundelkhand region, where a harsh summer and the lack of rain has been characterised by dry taps, long queues, in the limited sources that do exist, and in some places, death.

Numbers behind the heat

Though some parts of the region have benefitted from the Jal Jeevan Mission, a Union government programme started in August 2019 that envisions individual drinking water taps across households in India by 2024, the villagers in Bilhata say that they are yet to see its effects.

In Panna district, data from the mission states that only 15.93% of households have tap connections, the lowest in the state. Overall, the data shows that of 12.2 million households in the state, 5.03 million have access to clean tap water.

An April 2022 report from the Madhya Pradesh Public Health Engineering (PHE) department on water availability in the state said that of 51,000 villages, the groundwater level in 13,000 was critical. These villages are solely dependent on the transportation of water, said Malay Shrivastava, additional chief secretary, PHE.

A November 2021 report by the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) also raised broader concerns about the state, flagging that the groundwater decreased in 34% of the wells, the second-highest reduction in India after Rajasthan, which recorded a 59%. The fall was noted in comparison with the decadal (2011-2020) mean water level in November. In Panna, the dip in the water level of wells was as high as 72%, the report said.

Manvendra Singh, state convener of the Jal Jan Jodo Abhiyan, an organisation that works on water scarcity in Bundelkhand said, “A major drought hit the Bundelkhand region in 2016 after a deficit of rainfall for two straight years and a recovery has not happened. This water crisis also leads to crop failure.”

Singh pointed to the uneven rainfall in the state during the 2021 monsoon. While Chambal and Gwalior saw a strong season, Bundelkhand’s Damoh received 35% deficit rainfall, Panna 33%, and Chhatarpur 24%. “If monsoon fails in this region this year too, the problems will increase because of the incredibly harsh summer,” he said.

So far, things are not looking good for 2022. India Meteorological Department (IMD) data of cumulative rainfall shows that, till June 1, Tikamgarh and Panna did not get a drop of rain, as against a normal of 7.7mm in the month of June, while Chhatarpur, Damoh and Sagar showed a deficiency upwards of 90%.

“This summer has been very harsh. Places like Nowgaon and Khajuraho in Chhatarpur district, Khargone, Sidhi, Rajgarh, Gwalior, Datia, and a few others, have broken their heat records. Nowgaon and Khajuraho touched 48 degree Celsius three times in May alone,” PK Saha, scientist at IMD, Bhopal.

The scarcity has started to take a toll.

In the past two weeks, at least eight people have died in incidents that can be linked to water shortage. On Sunday, three minors in Raisen, drowned in a well which they had gone to in order to draw water to bathe. Rajkumar Bairagi, a father of one of the three children said, “The water crisis is responsible for his death. All the handpumps are dry, so even the young have to go to the well to draw water.”

In another incident on June 3, two people died in Narsinghpur district after consuming contaminated water from a pond — much like the one the villagers of Bilhata draw from — and 28 others were admitted to the district hospital with stomach pain. “There was a rush of patients complaining of the same stomach pain symptoms. It was because they had all consumed contaminated water from a local pond,” a doctor from the district said, asking not to be named.

The struggle for survival

Across villages in rural Madhya Pradesh, the battle for water has taken various, even if tragically familiar, forms. In Kurkutka village of Sheopur district, Rajesh Adivasi says almost the entire village of 640 people now walks two kilometres in the searing heat to fetch water from a dirty pond. This same pond is used by the cattle in the village.

“The village does have hand pumps and wells but they have all dried up to a major extent. We have to stand in queue for hours to fetch water at the few that have a very limited amount, and most times we come back empty handed. So all of us now walk to get muddy water. We have met the authorities about 10 times, but nothing has happened,” Adiwasi said.

Government officials admit that Tikamgarh and Sheopur, in particular, are places of concern. In a video conference on May 26 and 29, chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan asked the PHE department, the Jal Nigam, and district officials, to look into the crisis in these two districts on priority. Chouhan told officials at the meeting that migration from Tikamgarh because of shortage of water was a cause for concern, and that it was a priority to find a solution to these issues by 2024.

In Chhindwara, the 200 residents of Virdha have begun storing pieces of cloth to use as a makeshift filter while drawing water from a dirty pond in the vicinity. “We have no functional well or handpump in this heat, so we go to the pond. We take a piece of cloth, and pass the water through that, so that there is some filtration. A few days ago, some officials came to see our plight, but very little has been done,” said a resident, Mangal Bharti.

In some places, the scarcity is causing disagreements between villagers and the local administration on what can be defined as a “crisis”.

At the Chandi Chopda village of Damoh district, for instance, more than half the village travels about two kilometres to collect water from a muddy step well. “Our village has 20 wards, but only 10 have water facilities in the summer. There is always a long queue at hand pumps, and the wait is as much as 10 to 12 hours,” said Sachin Modi, a Janpad member.

When the village brought this to the attention of the district administration, a team arrived, but said that this did not qualify as a crisis, Modi said.

“In the summer, water crises are a common problem but it is not that the villages have no source of water. If a village has 10 hand pumps, six or eight are working, while two to four may not be. This doesn’t mean there is a crisis. It is true there are queues and people walk a long distance, but we are trying to resolve these issues as well,” the PHE department’s engineer in-chief KK Songaria said.

Projects to end woes

State government officials, however, said that they were cognisant of the scale of the problem, and apart from the Centre’s Jal Jeevan Mission, 5,187 check dams and ponds will be constructed in the next two years to conserve water under the Amrit Sarovar project. The project, which aims to improve water retention, was launched in April 2022. About 2,000 ponds will be completed by June this year, officials said.

In Sagar division, which has the districts of Sagar, Chhatarpur, Panna, Damoha, Niwari and Tikamgarh, divisional commissioner Mukesh Shukla said, “We are constructing 75 Amrit Sarovars in each district which have helped us in providing safe and clean drinking water. Old ponds are also being restored for water conservation.”

On May 29, chief minister Chouhan and Union agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar, who is the member of Parliament from Morena, inaugurated a scheme in Sheopur called “Jalvardhan” worth ₹178 crore, which envisages drawing water through a pipeline from the Parvati river. Officials also said that the PHE department was in the process of appointing 400 engineers across the state for greater efficiency, which should be completed by the end of the year.

PHE additional chief secretary Malay Shrivastava said that the state government has a dedicated control room where problems related to water are being monitored. “We are paying attention to every complaint to resolve problems. We have a control room and every single one of the 51,000 villages of 52 districts are being monitored.”

Back in Bilhata, by four in the afternoon, Nanhi Gond and others have returned safely, their utensils filled with brown, viscous liquid that barely qualifies as water. Even then, the day is a limited success. Tomorrow, the same hazardous battle, to avoid wildlife, and quench thirst, beckons.