Recognizing the importance of water as basic necessity of life for rich & poor and its scarcity is equally fatal for all.
We all are aware that women and at times children spend more than two hours a day for bringing water from rivers or springs and Hand pumps to their homes, not only in India but in several countries. In most of the villages Hand pump is the major source for water.
This is a story of a village named ‘Devri’ situated in ‘Aron’ block of Guna, Madhya Pradesh, where water is always a crisis. To deal with this the maintenance of water supplies requires consideration on priority, particularly those of hand pumps, for continued availability of water. However maintenance of hand pumps is easy other sources, as the spare parts or other needed stuff (such as oil, fuel) are quickly accessible. Earlier in this village people had to walk kilometers to fetch drinking water from the hand pumps. Despite of 6 hand pumps in the area only 1 was working well in terms of quantity & quality of water, others were not able to provide sufficient quantity of water as required for the whole village.
Many households depended on one pumping set near the village which worked on the power supply, but due to long power cuts it was not possible to get the regular water supply. The only source of Hand pump installed in the vicinity of the village comprising of hundreds of families whose water supply depended on it, was out of order for last 3 days but no one was aware as there were no power cuts. After 3 days as the power cut started the entire family had to rely again on that only nearest hand pump available, then they realized the problem. Subsequently, it was brought to the notice of Soochna Seva team at Aron, and the team immediately lodged a complaint with the department but no action was taken. Then they discussed the issue with Sarpanch and the same complaint was again lodged by him. The issue was resolved within 2 days and the Hand Pump got repaired for villagers to fetch water for their homes.