Kids dig well with bare hands to quench thirst

VADODARA: If you thought digging soil with bare hands and filling buckets was just a fun sport on the beach for children, well, read on. Here, in Gujarat's Chhota Udepur district's Dabba village, little children dig soil not as part of summer vacation fun, but as an existential routine to tap the daily quota of drinking water!
These tribal kids have to wake up at the crack of dawn to go to a well dug up near their houses and start removing soil with their bare hands. The more they dig, the more are their chances of finding sufficient drinking water for the day.
"It has become a summer ritual for many residents of our village located in a remote area of Naswadi taluka. From kids to grown-ups, everybody takes turns to dig the well in and fetch water for daily use," said a resident of Sitawala faliya in Dabba village.
"Water is a priority for us. If we excavate more soil from the well, we get better-quality water. So, our children also join us in the digging exercise. Sometimes kids miss their school, and we can't teach them at home too as a better part of daily routine is spent inside the well," rued Meena Bhil, another resident.
Sitawala faliya has a borewell, but it doesn't yield water. And another borewell is located more than two kilometres away from the village. "It's not possible for us to trek 5km to and fro on kuccha roads through uneven hilly terrain every day. So, we have no option but to dig the well near our locality deeper," Jayanti Bhil told TOI.
The locals, most of them farm labourers, said that they don't have piped water facilities despite their repeated requests to the government authorities concerned. While the kids and women dig the bottom of the 15ft-deep well, the men pull out vessels full of mud - an exercise that is practised for a few hours every day.