Madavappu People In Tiruppur Have Access To Safe Drinking Water After The Wait Of 25 Years
Madavappu People In Tiruppur Have Access To Safe Drinking Water After The Wait Of 25 Years (Photo/newindianexpress)
Drinking Water will first be delivered to seven tribal settlements in Udumalaipet via a gravity-based pipeline system. Madavappu residents have been waiting for safe drinking water for 25 years.
According to Mavadappu Moopar (village head) Kuppusamy, tribals are often self-sufficient and do not rely on others for survival. He pointed out that, despite having little ponds, woodland streams, and wells, they dry up in the summer. As a result, they get water from a larger water stream that runs through other tribe towns and is more than 12 kilometres long. The forest department and local authorities were petitioned by many village elders, but to no avail. Finally, on Thursday, they received piped water to our tribal hamlet, for which we are grateful to the forest service.
Udumalai Forest Ranger C Dhanabalan said that delivering piped water to seven tribal communities — Mavadappu, Kuzhipatti, Kattupatti, Poochakondapalayam, Kurumalai, Thirumoorthy malai village, and Sodamalai has been a requirement from long back. He said that the forest department's Special Area Development Project (SADP) was developed with a budget of '65 lakh and was built on a gravity-based water pipeline system.
He explained that they do not require any kind of electric power supply for bringing and pumping up the water through motors. The system filters the spring water using a slow sand filter. Forest officials and tribal people worked together in the first phase to discover perennial water streams in the forest area. He noted that they had difficulty finding their way because all tribal settlements were on hills and it was difficult to put pipes through the rocky and muddy terrain. For the past 40 days, 30 members have worked through harsh temperatures, rain, and rocky terrain to lay pipes for almost 37 kilometres to all tribal communities. The project included the installation of 48 pipe rolls, each weighing more than 1.5 tonne.