Dreams washed out

The dam was promised as a venture that would usher in prosperity to about 4,000 villagers in Kandi area in the foothills of Shivalik, 20 km from Chandigarh. With no water to irrigate their fields, the produce of farms in Krondewal and adjoining villages has gone down drastically in the last one decade. This has compelled the villagers to give up farming and opt for menial jobs in nearby cities. Sarpanch Bachna Ram’s brother Harish had to leave for Chandigarh, where he works as a milkman.

The lack of clean drinking water has meant that villagers have to battle diseases like cholera and diarrhoea. During summers, every house in these villages has one or two people who come down with fever. With rainfall in this area scanty, there are a few wells but they aren’t enough to meet the demand. “We get water supply for just an hour every day. In summer, the situation worsens. Sometimes, people fall ill after drinking water from the shallow well,” said villager Piare Lal.

The state’s public health department built the mud dam, which was supposed to be a lifeline for the villagers, in 1991. Apart from supplying water for drinking and irrigation, the water body that the dam created was also meant to bring the water table up in the area. The government of India had funded the project. But the construction was so bad that the dam got washed away.

“Due to incessant rains that year, the water level in the dam rose beyond its retaining capacity. The government officials were supposed to release the extra water but nobody visited the dam. And then, it simply got washed away,” recollects sarpanch Bachna Ram.

The villagers immediately approached the government officials who panicked. They visited the place and instructed the villagers not to talk about the incident.

“They promised another dam in the same area. But they never returned. We met them several times and the officials claimed they had sent the new design to the government and that they were waiting for the official sanction,” says Krishan Lal, a villager who works as a Class IV employee with the Public Health Department in Chandigarh.

“They were trying to buy time by asking us not to disclose the incident. They could have initiated an inquiry against the officials who used substandard construction material,” said Piare Lal.

Partap Singh, Executive Engineer, Mohali, confirmed that the dam had been washed away. “The matter is 18 years old and I was not in charge of the area. I have just taken over. Though I can’t tell you why the dam was washed away. But it’s true that no inquiry was conducted into the matter,” he said.

A Public Health official, on condition of anonymity, said no official had bothered to order an inquiry and the story of the broken dam was permanently buried inside government files. “The matter was hushed up,” he alleged.

Krondewal and nearby villages are dependant on the erratic rainfall. The average annual rainfall in the area varies from 800 mm to 1,250 mm, 80 per cent of which occurs during two months of the monsoon season. With very few water bodies to trap this rain, about 30 to 50 per cent go waste. Canal irrigation is not possible because of the undulating topography and because the ground water is too deep to exploit.

The dam—12 meters high and 110 metres long—had a catchment area of 73.19 hectares and would have stored 2,43,200 gallons of water.

Though Public Health Minister Bikramjit Singh Majithia had assured an inquiry into the matter, no action has been taken till now. Which isn’t surprising—till very recently, nobody in the government, which is just 20 kilometers away from the village, had heard of the washed away dam and the plight of the villagers.