The Social Welfare Department will be sinking 48,613 borewells over three months, beginning December, across the State under the Ganga Kalyana project. This time, the scheme, aimed at helping small and marginal Dalit farmers, will come with two riders: progress on the sinking of every borewell will be monitored online on a day-to-day basis and companies will have to cap every borewell that fails to yield water.
Social Welfare Minister H. Anjaneya told presspersons here on Saturday that the riders were part of the tender conditions in the light of complaints that companies were claiming money to sink borewells, but were leaving work incomplete, defrauding the government and farmers. Mr. Anjaneya said a GPS-enabled apparatus would record the process of sinking of borewells and it would be monitored online. The second condition comes in the wake of children falling into abandoned borewells that have been left uncapped.
The last such case in Karnataka was the death of six-year-old Thimmanna who fell into a borewell in his father’s field in Bagalkot district in August.
The Minister said that efforts were also being made to ensure immediate power connection to borewells sunk and added that they were clearing backlogs as well. He said that connecting them to solar panels was expensive and it would be difficult without a substantial subsidy from the government.
When asked if sinking of nearly 50,000 borewells in Karnataka would prove fatal for a State that already had a depleting water table, Mr. Anjaneya said they were not harvesting in any region that was certified as having dangerously low water table. The government is spending an average of Rs. 2.5 lakh per borewell.
