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| North Kashmir craves for ground water development | | | Syed Tahir Bukhari
BARAMULLA, Mar 7: Ground water development in North Kashmir's Kupwara district is a distant dream for the common masses as the activities in this regard have been going on a moderate scale.
Despite the fact that major portion of irrigation and drinking water supplies depend on the tube wells and dug wells in addition to various water supply schemes based on rivers/nallahs, no significant progress has been made in this border district.
"Public Health Engineering and Irrigation and Flood control departments are the nodal agencies in the state concerned with the water supplies for drinking and irrigation respectively. In hilly areas the supplies depends upon the springs and shallow tube wells and hand pumps, but it has yet to take off in our district," said Mushtaq Ahmad Najar, a resident of Kupwara district.
Mushtaq says that both these state departments drilled number of tube wells with the depth ranging between 50-95 meters. He says that apart from the tube wells number of hand pumps with the depth ranging from 30-60 meters depending upon the topography of the area with a discharge varying from 0.7 lps to 3 lps have been dug up adding that the benefits are yet to percolate to the grassroots level.
The residents said that issues like the occurrence of methane gas and accompanied silt, and occurrence of salty aquifers and boulders act as stumbling blocks for the development of ground water. These ground water issues and problems are localized and need to be focused by taking micro level studies in a particular area.
"Need of the hour is take these water sources in hand so that common masses of the district can take benefit from these sources and release of these chemical gases will not have a negative effect on their bodies and will not deter the populace of area," said the residents.
The residents said that in recent years modern means of ground water development have been employed. They said that Public Health Engineering has been constructing number of hand pumps and shallow-moderate depth tube wells for large-scale water supplies, but the benefits have not yet reached the people.
"The Karewa formations which underlie the district are deposited under fluvial-glacial and lacustrine conditions. Due to the deposition under the lacustrine environment, occurrence of methane gas is the common phenomenon in the various part of the district. This needs to be looked into for the development of ground water," said the residents. |
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