The two-year-long government-people collective for restoring Kottayam’s waterbodies is beginning to earn national accolades.
In a major boost to the Meenachil-Meenanthara and Kodoor river linking programme, Kottayam district has been selected as an outstanding performer in the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Generation Scheme for the construction of structures augmenting water harvesting.
The award, instituted by the Union Ministry of Rural Development, will be presented in New Delhi on December 19.
Launched as a pilot initiative in four panchayats and one municipality, the project has succeeded in restoring canals in 1,300 kilometres across 34 panchayats and four municipalities.
About 700 km was restored by including the work as a special package in the employment guarantee programme for the year 2017-18, an initiative that has now won the award.
Besides clearing and desilting a huge web of waterbodies, the project also envisaged protection of these canal banks by laying coir geo-textiles.
Farming season
The river linking programme entered its third straight farming season in October 2019 with plans to expand the operations to 5,000 acres from the current 3,100 acres. In implementing the project, the panchayat has so far expended ₹1.5 crore collected from the people and received budgetary allocations worth ₹5 crore.
The project takes its origin from a series of workshops held in October 2017. In the following five months, it spent about a record 26 lakh labour days to restore the waterbodies from stagnation and fragmentation.
