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| Sodam Panchayat faces acute shortage of drinking water | | | NEERAJ BADYAL
SAMBA, May 25: The people of Sodum, Reor, Hunded, Peyor and Mohargarh village under Sodam panchayat in Samba Assembly constituency are grappling with the water crisis in the district even as summer has just started.
Sodam Panchayat, located 22 kilometres from the district headquarters, is inhabited are daily labourers.
They work in surrounding the village which has not seen any kind of development.
The village has only one dugwell situated at Samotha but, the villager said is not supplying water for last six months. Women and children are forced to trek more than two kms everyday to fetch water. Locals have to dig up dried up ponds bed up to four feet to obtain water every summer. Locals said that for the last six months many areas are without water but the concerned officials don't bother to mitigate their difficulties despite several representations. "Public Health Engineering (PHE) department has stopped the supply of drinking water from last six months in many areas and people have to cover distance between 1-5 kilometers daily to fetch water from natural sources," they added.
"There are about six ponds, and two numbers of springs, but people do not want the tedium of drawing from these natural sources. They want easy tap water. As a result these natural water sources are silted and are drying up," claims Major Singh.
The gravity of the situation can be estimated from the fact that every summer many people from Gujjar-Bakkarwal community like Basharat Ali (45) migrate to other areas where water availability is relatively better and return during monsoon. When contacted, Assistant Executive Engineer PHE, Som Raj said that there was technical problem in power transformer of tube well and the water supply was affected for few months but now we have replaced the transformer. Hopefully, water supply to these villages will restore soon.
However, he assured that the PHE department would ensure water supply from next few days to minimize the woes of the villagers. |
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