Thekkumathur (TN),(PTI) :At the crack of dawn in this tribal hamlet in a remote corner of Jawadhu hill ranges in Tiruvannamalai district, D Ganesan gets ready to bring drinking water to his home, a chore he does every day, trekking for about a kilometre, with no guarantee of getting it.
“I have to go to Keezhur which is one kilometer from our place,” he told PTI. Armed with plastic pots, he narrates how there is no assurance always of getting water even after an arduous trek.
“Villagers there raise objections often when we go there to fetch water,” he says, adding “problems crop up due to it, we somehow tackle such issues.”
Keezhur has an overhead tank and water is supplied through pipelines fixed below.
Like Ganesan’s family, there are 69 other families in the hamlet who too do the same for water. The nearby village of Pudhupattu has similar water woes. They are all Scheduled Tribes, belonging to the “Malayali” (dwellers of hills) community found in the hilly terrains of Tamil Nadu.
About 48 km from Polur in Tiruvannamalai, the hamlet is three km away from Jamunamarathur, the biggest of all villages in the region and most inhabitants are STs.
Explaining why he needs to trek for some distance and why there is no water in his hamlet, Ganesan says they are on a relatively more elevated terrain than other villages and getting water had always been difficult there.
“Authorities dug up a well in nearby Gundalathur, but there was only little water, so they went to Keezhnellimarathur. There too, the well did not yield much water,” he says.
“Finally, a well was dug up on the fringes of the forest near our hamlet and that effort too had a similar end. We only curse ourselves for it,” Ganesan says with a wry smile.
For needs like bathing, they go to small streams off their neighbourhood, a distance of between one to two km, he said.
On livelihood options, he says, “we depend on cultivation of millet varieties like Samai (little millet) and ragi, which needs very little water.”
Villagers of Pudhupattu too narrated similar water woes to PTI and highlighted the poor condition of village roads and said getting water in the hills was different from sourcing it in the plains.
All villages here fall under Kalasapakkam Assembly Constituency in Tiruvannamalai District.
On the water woes, Kalasapakkam MLA V Panneerselvam said “all people’s issues are taken to the notice of our Chief Minister Amma” (as Jayalalithaa is fondly addressed by her supporters).
He said several steps, including putting up “Reverse Osmosis plants” in such villages for drinking water purposes would be taken.
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