Politicians are not the popular lot among the poor Adivasi voters holding the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) job cards in Adilabad district. As they feel that political leaders are responsible for their present pitiable state of utter poverty.
“It’s been ten years since the Dhamanguda minor irrigation was built, but we cannot access water from it for our fields. No politician had bothered to get a canal constructed for supply of water to our fields,” complains Gedam Ramu, revealing one of the major reasons for politicians to be quite unpopular among them. Ramu is one of the 450 Gond tribal wage-seekers from Jawaharnagar in Gudihatnoor mandal currently toiling at a work site near the NH-44 about a kilometre away from home. His condition or complaint is no different from that of the 1.45 lakh Scheduled Tribe having MGNREGA job cards in this district.
All the Gond families of Jawaharnagar have small land holdings ranging between three and four acres under the as yet untapped ayacut of Dhamanguda project located about 2 km away. “We would not be here had our fields been watered from the project,” observes Pushnak Radhabai, another farmer-cum-wage seeker.
“Leave alone irrigation, leaders have not cared to do away with the perennial drinking water problem which was being faced by the people at Jawaharnagar. Both the borewells have stopped working, the condition looking worse with the arrival of summer,” says Durva Radhabai.
The tribal colony was sanctioned a couple of bore wells last year after the Rural Water Supply Department conducted geological survey for underground sources. These are not functional, according to the villagers.
“If possible repair the borewells and replace the power pumps with hand pumps,” urges the elderly Radhabai. “Hand pumps will relieve us from the hardship to be faced in the event of failure of the mechanised pumpset,” she gives a reason for her plea.
