Reaping happiness from a wise, collective decision

Kannaraopet (Warangal Rural): Every household in this village, belonging to the affluent or the poor, has a water harvesting structure, testifying to the residents’ conscious, studied and fruitful efforts to re-charge groundwater. Quite naturally, the benefits that the villagers reap are manifold.

The magic soak pits, apart from fulfilling their basic purpose of water harvesting, have also helped in ensuring the overall well-being of residents. Kannaraopet, located about 50 km from Warangal, is now a model village in the Narsampet Assembly constituency.

It all began with an initiative taken collectively by the villagers who were once overwhelmed by acute shortage of water due to fast-depleting groundwater levels, particularly during summer. The villagers, while exploring ways and means of addressing their problem, settled for percolation pits as an answer.

The assistance offered by the government under the Employment Guarantee Scheme has come in handy for the villagers. Although government assistance is given for constructing one soak pit, many villagers, convinced of its use, have in fact built multiple additional pits at their cost.

The villagers’ initiative is attributed to the efforts made by Telangana Civil Supplies Corporation chairman Peddi Sudarshan Reddy who has been actively campaigning across the constituency with support from government officials.

The village, a gram panchayat in Nallabelly mandal, has 270 households and a population of 1090, but as many as 300 soak pits and percolation pits were built during last year. Mostly tribals inhabit its two hamlets -- Buchireddypalle and Padmapuram.

‘Now, the ground water is fully charged; we haven’t faced any scarcity for water this summer’ the village sarpanch Lunavath Venkanna told The Hans India. Although support under EGS is available to all the villages, very few villages have made use of it and we are fortunate for having made the best use of it, he noted.

“Every drop of water used in our house as well as the rain water run-off now goes into water harvesting structures,” said E Krishna Reddy, a resident who has built a percolation pit and a soak pit, one for rainwater and the other for waste water.

Now the streets are clean. Side drains, once stinking with dirty pools of water, are now dry and no water flows on the streets. For, unlike in the past, water is not discharged into the streets after daily use. It has also the arrested biggest problem:

breeding of mosquitoes. Consequently, the villagers are now largely free from viral fevers. Most of them are healthy. Thus, we have saved money that might have otherwise gone towards treatments, Krishna Reddy explained.

“I have dug a well in my home, but it used to go dry in summer every year. After I built a percolation pit to allow rainwater to seep into ground, the well is now full of water in all seasons,” pointed out the village deputy sarpanch T Ravinder Reddy.
The farmers of the village had also built 29 farm ponds, which not only recharged the bore wells in the fields, but also controlled soil erosion, he added.

By James Edwin