Summary of our activities in the urban areas
We went to the rural areas of Konkan for 5 days, to investigate the drinking water problems people have here. We were stationated in the village devrukh to be precize. We have seen a lot in those days so fist a summary of our activities:
- We visited a ’Wadu’ (about 600 people) to see how these people get their water and how they use it.
- We spoke to one of the five members of the ‘Grandpatjati’ (that’s the council of wise men that every village has) about the way people use water.
- We visited a dam the goverment is making in this area. The goverment uses this water for the grid connections most people have in this region.
- We spoke to two poor woman who were working in the field, carring big pots of water on their heads.
- We visited a special village that is an great example of living in harmony with nature. We will wrote a seperate blog about that.
- we visited several wadus/houses close to the coast to see if living so close to the see gives water problems
- We visited a local public healthcare centre and we spoke to the doctor.
Summary of some interesting findings
Before we summarize the most important findings it is good to tell something about he housing situation in the rural areas. In the rural areas you have different types of villages. You have the ‘real’ villages (over 2000 people), you have the so called ‘Wadu’s’ small villages with a few hundred people and you have small settlements with just some houses. In the villages you mostly see real houses, on the farmland it is also seen that the small settlements exist out of cottages made out of plastic sheets, wood and stones.
Grid connection
In the real villages of Konkan all the people have a connection to the grid. Every month a fixed amount of money needs to be paid for this connection and you have to pay ones when you want the connection. This grid connection is a connection provided by the government and the water is coming from a big lake behind a dam the government has build here.
lake behind dam that supplies the governmental grid
construction work at the dam
other side of the dam
Private wells
You see that most of the people with some money also have there own well. The place we slept (Onest) had its own well for example and they used this water for everything. The grid water is only used for watering the garden. The cost for digging a well is between 20 and 40.000 rupees. If you want a well an engineer comes by to tell were to dig the well exactly and what dept it should be. Most of the time it’s around 300 feet deep.
Governemental wells
People with less money don’t have an own well. They use a public well made by the government. In the last 8 year the government provided a lot of wells in the rural areas so everybody has access to water. We have heard and seen that in the most unfortunate situation you have to walk for a bit more than 1km to reach a well, al the other people life closer to the well than that. When the ladies go to the well to collect water they bring water vessels with them. On the way back they carrie two of them on their head.
girl carrying watervesel on her head
people drink the water directly from the well
We have seen two types of wells; old wells (called wells) and modern wells (called bore). The old ones are big open wholes (waterput) while the new ones exist out of a closed system (pipe and handpump)
Modern well (bore well)
bore well
Open well
Availability
In the konkan region the wells are filled with water all year long, they almost never dry up. This is because of two reasons. First of all there falls a lot of rain during the monsoon. Second, there are a lot of trees in this region that can hold the water for a long time. They make sure that the rain that falls in June and July will be kept.
There are many trees that can hold the water
There are some places in the konkan region with less trees and there the wells dry up some times. In that case the government comes with tankers filled with drinking water to solve the water shortage. So in general you can say that there is no problem in the rural areas of konkan if you look at availability of drinking water.
tanker with drinking water
Quality
If we should believe the people in Konkan, the water from the wells is of really good quality. The ground filters the water naturally so it can be consumed directly from the well (no boiling or filtering). People avoid the use of parricides because they know it can contaminate the water. By accident we tested the quality of the water our selves as well. We drank a whole glass of water from the well of Onest (because we thought it was bottle water). We are still alive and kicking so we can say that the quality is good indeed.
Human errors
So if you ask us there are no big problems in relation to drinking water in the rural areas of Konkan. The only improvement we see is increasing the changes of human errors. As the picture showed, all the old fasion wells are big wholes in the ground. None of them is properly covered so all kinds of things can easily fall in. When an animal falls in for example the water will get contaminated. When something like this happens, the people will use chlorine drops to clean the water again. (the government has given all the villagers a bottle with chlorine for cleaning contaminated water)
