Villagers in Eluru district fight back as aqua farm threatens to pollute drinking water

Residents of the SC colony of Kanukollu village do not get tap water even today; their only source of drinking water is well, which too faces threat of salinisation

Fifty-year-old Mariyamma walks about half a kilometre every day carrying a 10-litre steel pot of water from a nearby well to her house. She makes 20 such trips a day, 10 in the morning and 10 in the evening, walking almost ten kilometres daily since she got married 25 years ago.

Despite the arduous task, Mariyamma, belonging to an SC community in Kanukollu village of Mandavalli mandal in Eluru district, does not complain. “There are others who walk for more than a kilometre to fetch drinking water,” she says.

From the time borewells started yielding saline water three decades ago, everyone in the village turned to wells for drinking water. “While water in four out of seven wells has become undrinkable, thanks to the rampant aquaculture activities, the remaining three also face the threat of salinisation,” she adds.

One of the wells, located in the SC colony, is the lifeline for this community and for people of four other villages— Puttalacheruvu, Chintalapudi, Gunnanapudi and Lellapudi.

While people of other castes have regular water supply at least for their everyday needs, the two SC colonies, home to 600 families, have not been given a tap connection since the colonies came up in the 1980s. This forces them to carry many more loads of water from the well than is carried by the people of other communities.

On top of this, ten days ago, efforts were made to dig an aqua pond on over nine acres of fertile land, adjacent to the colony; the site is hardly 300 metres from the well.

The villagers, fearing contamination of the only well in their colony, tried to get an FIR registered against the owner, P. Sathyanarayana, whose wife is a ruling party MPTC member. The police, however, reportedly refused to register the FIR and hurled casteist slurs at them and threatened to arrest them, the villagers alleged. Mandavalli sub inspector P. Rama Krishna, however, said they were only trying to bring the situation under control and that they did not verbally abuse anyone.