Spending crores of rupees on  new water supply schemes in Anantnag village fail to resolve  the public woes, villagers protest against the PHE Department

Sameer Ahmad

Anantnag 12, December: The residents of Kamad village here in Anantnag district have been protesting for the last three days against the lackadaisical approach of the PHE department. Scores of people hit the road and staged a massive protest against the water scarcity in the area.

Villagers alleged that they face a lot of problems due to the acute shortage of water supply for the past several years. However, the concerned officials are watching as mute spectators.

Miffed over the ‘callous’ attitude of the Public Health Engineering (PHE) department, the villagers of the Kamad area threaten the administration to hit the streets if their problem will not be solved.

Talking to the Arising state, Ali Mohd, a resident said that we are being deprived of water facility, despite repeated requests to authorities neither the concerned department nor the administration is bothered to give us respite. They said they are facing the problems of water for a long and the authorities are not taking any measures to end the hardships of the people.

He said that after spending crores of rupees on water supply scheme here in ugjan teng area of Anantnag village, the Jal Shakti Department (JSD) has come up with another scheme, worth crores of rupees. However, the locals discerned that the new scheme is bound to fail like the earlier one, given the fact that the test bore is gushing out little water, and is full of silt.

We were forced to cover a distance of almost a kilometer to fetch drinking water from tube wells, said Ali. Adding that sometimes they use water from the ponds which put our health at great risk.

Last year community-wide disease outbreak associated with drinking contaminated water in our village ended up at least 150 people hospitalized after they fell sick, Ali said.

Another resident while talking to the Arising state alleged that after the PHE Department spending crores of rupees on the old scheme they have come up with this new one which is also bound to fail, adding that the test bore dug by the department recently was gushing out water full of silt.

Meanwhile, talking to Arising state, Executive Engineer JSD Bijbehara Division Mohammad Haneef refuted the allegations and said that the new scheme is not defunct in the village. We have excavated dug well during the excavation of dug well clean water was collected. The water from the dug well has to be placed in an OST (Opioid substitution treatment). He said that we need land for the OST we have already written about the land to the District administration. When we receive a plot of land from the District administration we will start a new scheme in an area which will cater to all nearby villages he said.