The acute scarcity of drinking water in the coastal village of Nainamvalappu has put residents to much hardship.
The local people say water has always been a rare commodity at Nainamvalappu, where the situation has aggravated during the past two months with the peaking of summer. “We get water once in four days now, but no one knows the timing of the supply ,” says N.V. Mariyabi, a resident of Nainamvalappu. The supply through the Kerala Water Authority (KWA) pipeline is often in the early hours of the day. Most of the residents stay up through the night waiting for water supply,” says Ms. Mariyabi.
Being close to the sea, well water is saline during summer and it’s unfit to be used for non-drinking purposes too, says N. Naufal. He says his mother had fallen ill owing to lack of sleep as she waits in the queue at the public tap at night. “Around 750 residents of this region, especially women, are going through hell,” he says.
Water supply through the public taps is a trickle at Nainamvalappu, which is one of the “tail-end” of the Corporation’s distribution lines. “It takes several minutes to collect even a small pot of drinking water from the tap,” says Mujeeb Rahman, another resident. Though the residents have taken up their grievance with the authorities concerned, including the Corporation Mayor, local MLA and Minister for Social Welfare M.K. Muneer, District Collector and the KWA authorities, the situation remains unchanged. .
When contacted, ward councillor Braziliya Shamsudheen said the response from the KWA was not promising though she had made some efforts to find a solution to the issue. “We are trying to tide over the crisis by making drinking water available to the people in tanker lorries on alternative days now, which, however, would be far from a permanent solution,” she says.
K. Moideenkoya, Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) leader and chairman of the Kerala Urban and Rural Development Finance Corporation, who had intervened in the issue, told The Hindu that the KWA officials had agreed to rectify the problem in the pipeline with immediate effect. “A block has been noticed in the waterline to the region, which will be rectified in two days,” he said.
KWA assistant engineer A.M. Gireeshkumar said the only hope of any solution to the present crisis would be with the commissioning of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)-aided drinking water project. “Things are expected to improve once it is commissioned,” he said.
