KASARGOD: IN the middle of a 30-acre areca orchard, a short PVC pipe attached to the mouth of two narrow tunnels oozes out water into a 30,000-litre irrigation tank. The thin water supply has not stopped for the past 40 years, says Dhanyachandroji alias Gangadhar Rao (65), owner of the orchard at Mulankode near Kundamkuzhi in Bandaduka panchayat. “Day and night, the water falls into a mud tank we call madhakam. This is enough to irrigate my property,” says the full-time farmer.
Malayalees call such manmade tunnels turangam and the Kannada-speakers call them suranga. They are unique to northern parts of Kasargod and southern parts of Dakshina Kannada. Rural journalist Sree Padre, who has worked extensively on water-harvesting, calls them the “the lifeline” of people in the hills.
Suranga are manmade horizontal tunnel systems that cut into slopes of laterite hills to extract groundwater. “It is the most sustainable method to extract groundwater,” says Valliyil Govindankutty, hydrogeologist and assistant professor at the Government College, Chittur, Palakkad. The suranga makers -- a decreasing lot of highly-skilled workers -- maintain a small gradient as they tunnel horizontally into the hill till they find water. “They only make a small incision and leave it at that,” Sree Padre says. The slope will bring the water to the mouth of the tunnel.
The method is so efficient that most northern areas of Kasargod district depend of surangas. A village, Bayar, near Uppala has 2,000 surangas.
Grim tidings
However, the future of this unique system looks bleak, says Govindankutty, the hydrogeologist who helped revive the karez, a 400-year-old similar but more complex system, in Bidar city of Karnataka. The suranga is similar to the karez and qanat in Iran, he says. “Surangas that tap the top water tables are depleting fast,” he says.
Tampering with nature
A major reason for depletion of water table is the levelling of hillocks. And another, the introduction of exotic trees such as acacia and gliricidia by the Social Forestry Department. “Look at the huge area the department has covered with acacia instead of promoting jackfruit and mangoes,” Govindankutty says.
With the water table dipping, farmers dig surangas at multiple levels on the same slope, increasing the number of surangas in disuse. On Gangadhar’s 35-acre property near Kundamkuzhi, there are 20 surangas of which only three have water.
Shankara Narayan Bhat, a wealthy farmer, has 100 surangas on his 30-acre farm land of which only two have water.
Chance of revival
Govindankutty says groundwater level can be raised by cleaning up the wells, public ponds and planting carefully selected local vegetation.
As part of his Bidar project, where he implemented these steps, the water expert monitored 36 wells at Naubad in Bidar, an arid city.
“Almost 99% of the wells were dry in January 2012, 2013 and 2014,” he says. The results started showing in 2015. “Last year and this year, all 36 wells are half- full,” he says. “And I’m sure it can be replicated in Kasargod too.”
The inside story
At Sheni in Enmakaje panchayat, Suryanarayan Nayak, a farmer and coir maker, took ‘Express’ through the most sophisticated suranga in the district. The 98-year-old suranga is 300-m-long and passes by the Sri Sharadamba Higher Secondary School at Sheni and goes under the Kumbla-Perla PWD Road. The suranga, owned by Nayak’s family, has eight air vents that jut out to the road. “The diggers used to send out the laterite soil through these vents, which also provided them with oxygen,” says Nayak. Residents used the vents to draw water too, says Padre. Today, the suranga is in a sorry state. The openings of waste pipes of two restaurants are at the suranga’s starting point, where plastic waste and garbage is heaped up. “Sometimes schoolchildren throw rocks through the vents just to hear the splash,” he says.At Thotadamane near Sheni, Suma Nayak says six families used to depend on her suranga till five summers ago. “Today they have borewell. We are still drawing water from the suranga.”