Fifty-year-old Sankaraiah like other fellow farmers in Mohideenpuram, near the Cumbum tank, the second largest irrigation tank in Asia, used to grow paddy and other water-intensive crops till a few decades ago.
Thanks to climate change, people in the village with a population of 2,000 are not even able to manage a few pots of safe drinking water, leave alone growing crops with even the traditional stepwell, which have been quenching their thirst for centuries, going bone dry.
Performance of rituals
“People from neighbouring villages too used to make a beeline to the stepwell here as its water used to be sweet and it had sufficient storage even during peak of summer,” says another villager Srinivasa Rao staring at the barren well now in disuse. Water used to be taken from the stepwell for performance of rituals at the historic Kalpeswaraswamy temple opposite to it. Now they wait for arrival of tankers not just for drinking but also for washing and other purposes. In the yesteryears, based on the water level in the stepwell, their forefathers used to get a warning of any breach to the Cumbum tank with a drainage area of 1,100 sq km and irrigating over 10,000 acres. “We are unable to source water even if we sink borewells up to 700 ft,” says yet another farmer Venkateswarlu, showing vast stretches of land left fallow.
Migration from the village to cities and towns looking for greener pastures had started even before the arrival of summer this year, he says, adding that Cumbam tank, one of the oldest man-made lakes, had not seen any significant inflows from the Nallamala hills in the last five years. The lake, about 7 km long and about 3.5 km wide, was built by Vijayanagara emperor Srikrishnadevaraya’s wife Varadharajamma by using elephants for stamping of earth.
Now they are hoping against hope for early completion of the Veligonda project, which has missed several deadlines in the past, for revival of the agrarian economy, they say while showing the dry canal close to the stepwell.
