What do you do when every pot has come to the only well and there’s just a mossy puddle to draw from?
RATNAPUR: Ratnapur lies up on a hill and Pendur Ramchander is guiding me to it this afternoon. We take the snaking path up a steep gradient strewn with loose rock.
Under a 45-degree sun, 100 metres is a long time up this path. I stop for a swig of Aquafina Purity Guaranteed and notice that my nickel silver bangle has burnt a welt into my skin. I wince and I look at my guide’s face for a trace of amusement. I’m a city girl, what the hell!
“Imagine going up this path with two pots of water on the head, madam,” he says. Ramchander is forty-fiveish, a Telugu teacher in a government high school for girls up above.
Ratnapur is a Gond village about 30 km from Adilabad, the district HQ. It’s a village of 80 families and 400 people. It has produced three famous sons, two home guards and one teacher, which is Ramchander. It can only be reached via uphill path.
Up in the village, we head straight to the first sign of activity. It’s the village well, the only one, a 100 m from the dwellings. Here now in the midday sun, the whole village, every pot in every house, seems to have assembled at the well.
I go to the edge and peer down as a dank smell wafts up from all the frenetic bailing that’s been going on here. It’s about 9m deep, a hole in the earth with its entrails showing – rocks and sand and dirt. ‘Water’ is a few mossy puddles.
“Look at the water level,” said a 60-year-old man. “It will be over in the next three or four days.”
When Ratnapur’s well dries up, as it surely will, everyone has to do the trudge down to the new well at the bottom of the hill and struggle Sisyphus-like back up that precipitous path with two pots balanced on your head. Acrobatics is a useful skill in Ratnapur.
“I’m 50 now,” said a woman guarding an orange plastic pot at the edge of the well. “I have struggled for drinking water every day of my life. I know that my children will also die the same way.”
Ratnapur is down to the dregs but it’s still a democracy. When the dry months begin, the elders ration water from the well to all the households. Each family is apportioned a set number of pots they can fill.
It’s a summer tradition of the Gonds, says Ramchander.
“Gudi lo prasadam panchinattu, neellu panchutaru, madam (it’s like distributing prasadam at the temple, madam,” he says.
When the well dries, the trudge to the one at the foot of the hill begins. Women in each family do the trudge at least five times a day. While most of the villagers have no choice than to go up and down, those who are slightly better off use bullock carts to heave 200 litre drums up and down that snaky path. “We have to make at least two trips a day,” says Athram Sowmitra.
Aiyyo, what will the government do?
There’s a government out there of course, good to dig a few borewells. Noticing the plight of Ratnapur, babus came by back in 2004, dug 10 borewells. Five struck water but went dry not a long time later. Ratnapur is back to its lone well.
Pendur Birsha, president of the Village Tribal Development Authority, says he’s despaired of telling the government that borewells don’t help for there’s just no ground water on that hill. It wasn’t until 2016 that the government heard him and then they decided to dig a well at the foot of the hill and pump the water up.
For Ratnapur’s 80 families, this was heavy engineering and it promised to help. The well was dug and a motor was fixed and an overhead tank was built in Ratnapur.
“But then the pipeline has not been laid and the entire set up is just wasted,” says Pendur Birsha, slapping his forehead in the classical aiyyo gesture.
Drought’s dire deeds
In an iconic essay written in November 1989, the late human rights activist K Balagopal threw light on eternal scepter of drought in rural India. Little has changed since then.
An excerpt from Balagopal’s essay in the Economic and Political Weekly. There was a near total failure of both the Kharif and the Rabbi crops, for as you all know, it rained too much in the first season and not at all in the second.
And soon the peasants — especially the tribals, many of whom do not have title deeds for the land they cultivate and therefore cannot raise loans from banks — were close to starvation.
They started selling their cows and bullocks at the weekly fairs. The Jainur fair soon started looking like an exclusive cattle fair.
A man needs a moral reason for doing selfish things, as we all know, and tribals would say they are selling the cattle because there is no fodder to feed them with, but in reality the selfish fellows are selling the dumb animals, just so that they can feed themselves.
Andhra Pradesh drought: Here is the real picture of apocalypse
Karnataka's drought relief plan: Dig up to a kilometre in search of water
Hit by drought, Tamil Nadu farmers turn to technology for saving crops
Hard hit by drought, villages in Andhra's Anantapur become ghost towns
Kerala's creeping drought: Somebody save pallams from these saviours