Mathuranpura & Mahoba: World’s worst water starved places reflecting worsening drought situation in North India

By NewsGram Staff Writer

Mathuranpura, a particularly poor neighbourhood in Mahoba, one of India's 250 poorest districts is home to 1,000 dalits and where few things are as exclusionary as access to water.

None of the 1,000 dalits who live in mostly mud-and-thatch homes have regular jobs (the majority are construction workers), there is no school in the neighbourhood and none of their homes has piped water.

On June 23, three months after bountiful but unseasonal rains destroyed crops and imperilled farming – as we reported earlier – Mathuranpura's dalits went to the district magistrate, Vireshwar Singh, with a petition: Give us a water pipeline.

A year ago, a water pipeline was laid, a group of Mathuranpura residents told Khabar Lahariya. It stopped at the house of the panchayat (council) chairman, who, they alleged, did not allow the pipeline to be extended to their mohalla, or neighbourhood.

So dire is the crisis in this water-starved district that locals sometimes dig tunnels some distance from their villages to collect water seeping from the ground, their main source of water, Khabar Lahariya previously reported.

It is a reflection of a quietly, worsening groundwater situation, not just in Mahoba – 240 km southeast of the Uttar Pradesh capital Lucknow – but across northern India. The situation has been given little attention by the government or media. As a column in The Guardian pointed out, when water is overused or unavailable, it takes only poor management to plunge a region into crisis.

Mahoba's crisis came rapidly, when its once plentiful water sources were polluted or otherwise devastated (as we shall see later). Mathuranpura's water source is a handpump, which yields little water. The locals said their "arms were exhausted" working it and they were tired queuing up day and night. The water reduces, and the waits get longer. So, they want that pipeline.

District magistrate Singh said he has taken the petition with "some seriousness" and in the presence of Khabar Lahariya reporters, ordered the water department to lay a pipeline to Mathuranpura.

If this happens, Mathuranpura should consider itself lucky. No more than 7 percent of Mahoba district's people have a drinking-water source at home or in their compounds, according to census data.

In rural Mahoba, 95.3 percent of people have no access to tap water from a treated source; although more than 30 percent of village households have access to tap water.

Mathuranpura and Mahoba's situation is not unusual in India, where 22.2 percent of rural households get their drinking water from a source that is at least half a kilometre away from home. More than 116 million Indian households in villages cannot access water from a tap. Only 7 percent households have drinking water sources within their compound in the villages of Mahoba district.

It will be ever more difficult to supply those households with water because more than half of India now faces what is called "high" to "extremely high" water stress. Across parts of northern India, skyrocketing demands on water for agriculture and growing populations have pushed groundwater to levels more critical than anywhere else on earth.

The situation is as grim on the Gangetic plains, and a variety of studies reveal a common trend.

After the winter deluge, a great water scarcity has fallen across Mahoba, indicating the vagaries of life without an assured supply of water.

Despite being known as the land of talaabs, or ponds, the access to drinking water supply is limited. Most of these large and beautiful water bodies are now dirty and badly maintained. There has been no work or special schemes that may make the water potable. In Charkhari block, which has seven large taalaabs, several homes are now served by domestic drainage, but the drains empty into a pond.

The major river in Mahoba, Chandrawal, first showed signs of drying up a decade ago, but a drought in 2008 was the final blow. Efforts are being made to revive the river only now.

Even as groundwater levels drop, Mahoba – and northern India – has no option but to continue with the effort to supply drinking water, whether piped in from rivers or from groundwater sources, such as borewells and lakes.

The budget for fiscal 2015-16 has been earmarked Rs 11,000 crore for the centrally-sponsored National Rural Drinking Water Programme – now a part of the Swachh Bharat (clean India) mission – launched in 2007 to provide safe drinking water to 116 million deprived households in India's villages. Delhi provides financial assistance to states and union territories for drinking water projects and water-quality testing.

But no funds have been released this year to Mahoba, so far.

With funding from Delhi declining because of financial devolution-the process of handing over money to the states to do their own spending-it is uncertain what lies ahead for Mahoba.

(In arrangement with IndiaSpend.org, a data-driven, non-profit, public interest journalism platform. This story has been produced in partnership with Khabar Lahariya, a rural, weekly newspaper run by a collective of female journalists from five districts in Uttar Pradesh and one in Bihar. Each district has its own edition, brought out in the local language of the district.

(With inputs from IANS)