Once brimming irrigation tank turns bone dry

Borewells sunk become defunct despite district receiving 100% excess rainfall in September

Shyamanthi Eswaramma at Pathacheruvu village, where borewells have become defunct.

More than 100 borewells dug in the past one year, a majority of them during the pandemic, have gone dry, and Pathacheruvu, a village in Kalyandurg mandal of Anantapur district, today resembles a ‘graveyard of borewells’ (a rough estimate puts their number at 1,000), where hardly a couple of them yield one-inch of water from 500 feet below the surface.

Interestingly, residents had to abandon the village in 2002 because of abundance of water in the irrigation tank by the same name — Pathacheruvu or Peddacheruvu.

The village, situated about a couple of km from the Anantapur - Kalyandurg State Highway, used to get cut off from the remaining areas due to the overflowing irrigation tank.

With much persuasion, the TDP government had given small bits of land to the villagers close to the State Highway. The new habitation got the same name (Pathacheruvu) in the revenue records.

Today, there is an eerie silence in the old habitation as it has been abandoned. Only the superstructures of houses remain. The doors and windows of these houses have been removed and a few walls have partially fallen.

Despite the district recording 100% excess rainfall in September, and more than the annual rainfall in the first four months, there is not a drop of water in the Peddacheruvu. As a result, farmers such as Shyamanthi Eswaramma struggle to irrigate the tomato crop.

Plight of farmers

With the inflows into the irrigation tank dwindling over the last 18 years, the villagers started sinking tens of borewells every year, and Eswaramma’s husband had sunk 15 boreswells.

Burdened with debts and apprehending pressure from the money-lenders, he had deserted his wife and three children and left for Bengaluru.

But Eswaramma stayed put, purchased a bullock and began farming with the help of her children. Besides farming, she had taken up rearing of country hens to make both ends meet.

In the last one year, she sunk three borewells, and only one of them yields one-inch of water for an hour enough for a small piece of land adjacent to the old habitation, where she grows tomatoes.

Though she has three acres of land in three different locations in the village, there is no water for irrigation.