Duli Bai doesn’t sleep very well these days. Every night, she gets up frequently to check if water has started flowing through the dry taps in Piplia village in the otherwise lush Jhalawar district. And the minute she senses the first plop of a water drop, she briskly picks up her pot and queues up. ‘‘It doesn’t matter what time of the day or night it is,’’ she says. ‘‘If I am not in that line early enough, there will be no water to drink in my house, no water to cook and no water to clean.’’ Like Piplia, 10,000 villages in Rajasthan are watching their taps, tube wells and wells dry up as the summer sun scorches the desert state. Farmers may be reaping bumper crops thanks to the ‘‘decent monsoon’’ that lashed down in five years of drought, but in their homes they don’t have enough water to drink. Across Rajasthan, all along the route deputy prime minister L K Advani’s Bharat Uday rath has taken and beyond, parched throats are queuing up in front of trickling water taps. Besides 10,000 villages, there are around 67 cities staring at a water crisis that is worsening with every passing day even as the Vasundhara Raje government struggles to supply clean drinking water. Rajasthan supports about five per cent of the country’s total population and 10 per cent of the geographic area but shares only one per cent of its ground water resource. Data further indicates that ‘‘indiscriminate tapping of ground water for irrigation and industrial purposes’’ has led to a steady depletion of the water table approximately at the rate of one metre per year. As a result, there are 86 development blocks in the state that have been categorized as ‘‘dark zones’’. While a World Bank report warned that all the ground water in Jaipur would dry up by 2006, slowly the Water Works Department is discovering that in 86 of the 240 blocks, the ground water levels have dipped below 15 metres.
