Defunct tubewells lead to water crisis

Kendrapada: In the middle of a scorching summer, several villages in Kendrapara district are staring at acute drinking water crisis owing to defunct tubewells and water ATMs.
Residents of Rajkanika block in the district were forced to stand in long serpentine queues in the blazing heat to get a few buckets of drinking water from a few wells.
“Six tubewells in our community have not been operating for the past three months. Women now need to wait in queues for hours to fetch a pot of water from the village’s only tubewell, which is now operational,” said Swapna Barik, a villager of Bharigada.
“We trek around 1km every day to collect water from a well. Even the tubewells spew water with high salinity level forcing people to trek to faraway places during summer to get water,” said Ranjan Behera, a villager from Trilokpur.
“Senior citizens and children are suffering. Our concerns are not important to the politicians; they only visit us to solicit votes. In order to supply residents with safe drinking water at a low cost in rural regions of Rajkanika block, the government installed about 20 water ATMs there in 2018. However, owing to neglect, these water-vending machines have been inoperable for more than a year, and as a result, we are unable to obtain drinking water,” alleged Narendra Rout of Bharigada village.