Mukhed, Nanded: In global migration trends, difficult living and environmental circumstances are pushing people to leave their homes and move closer to their workplace. But in Sawargaon Pir village in Mukhed, the trend is exactly the opposite.
“I have a house and my whole family here. I also have a well-paying government job. I still had to move 65 kilometres away to Nanded city and travel each day to the village,” says Muzawar Gafoor, a 39-year-old state transport bus conductor. Despite the availability of job opportunities in the village, people have moved away from the village and travel back home every day for work.
“How does one live without water?” Gafoor asks, a primary reason why the village has witnessed reverse migration here over the past decade.
On paper, Sawargaon Pir village, like most of the 1,600 villages in Nanded, is well equipped to handle the water crisis. But a closer look reveals broken pipelines, dried handpumps and private water tankers zipping in and out of the village.
Most youth in Nanded are forced to migrate due to drought and subsequent water shortage in the villages. Photo: Sukanya Shantha/The Wire
More than 2.5 crore spent
According to the village administration, over Rs 2.5 crore was spent specifically on different projects to provide water to the more than 6,000 people of the village. Of this, Rs 50 lakh was spent only under the state’s flagship Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyan (JSA) scheme.
Sawargaon Pir was one of the first villages to have been adopted under the JSA, an integrated water conservation scheme announced with much fanfare in December 2014. Almost five years after the scheme’s launch, the village continues to be water-parched and struggles to meet even the daily domestic water requirement.
In a mixed population village, where crops have failed season after season, most residents are dependent on labour work, private industries or a handful of government jobs. A sizeable population also travels to sugarcane farms and brick kilns in the relatively richer western Maharashtra.
Dhanaji Kamble, a resident of the village, tells The Wire that the migration is directly connected with the non-availability of water in the village. “At least three attempts were made to lay water lines in the village. Each time, the work was stopped abruptly. You will see two different pipelines in the village. One which ends abruptly, put up by the state, and another by a private well owner. We pay over Rs 500 every month to the private owner for drinking water supply once every week,” Kamble says.
In this village, almost every household has attempted to dig a borewell, some as deep as 60 and 70 feet. Only one family managed to find some water, villagers say. “The cost of digging a borewell is around Rs 70,000-1 lakh. But no water is available. It is not because there is no water here. It is because water has been diverted away over many years and the connectivity exercise under several schemes was stopped abruptly,” feels Premkumar Kamble, a villager.
Marathwada has always had deficient rainfall and the region has faced consecutive droughts over the past decade. In 2014, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis took charge of the state amid a severe drought. Marathwada recorded severe rainfall deficit in 2014 and 2015. In 2018, the situation worsened as the region suffered over 100 days of dry spell during the average rainy season of 150 days. Among the nine districts of Marathwada, though Nanded is least affected, the water shortage is just as bad.
A broken water line in Sawargaon Pir village. Photo: Sukanya Shantha/The Wire
The JSA scheme
The JSA is not a standalone scheme but is implemented alongside 14 other water conservation projects. The scheme, which claims to provide water to 5,000 villages and making them free of water scarcity every year, is largely dependent on the implementation of other core, Central and state projects like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act (MGNREGA) and the Integrated Watershed Management Programme (IWPM).
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Around Sawargaon Pir, village records show that works such as desilting, building a farm pond and contour bunds have been taken up. The record states work worth more than Rs 2 crore has been completed under three primary projects: MGNREGA, IWMP and the Environment Santulit Samrudh Gram Vikas Yojana (a scheme started by the rural development and panchayat raj department to undertake sustainable rural development).
Shivaji Gedewad, a social activist from the region, points to several discrepancies in the claims made by the administration. He says though these projects had the sole purpose of providing water to the villages, “Most of the work is either half done or doesn’t exist. Besides these core projects, the state decided to launch the JSA scheme here. Water still remains a distant dream.”
A few kilometres from Sawargaon Pir, in Mangyal village, a similar story plays out. Of the village’s population of 3,000, mostly belonging to the Scheduled Caste and OBC communities, almost 90% migrate to the nearby city or to western Maharashtra for work. Here too, like Sawargaon Pir, the grampanchyat claims lot of work was completed over the past five years to provide water.
Besides the MGNREGA and IWMP scheme, smaller schemes like the Dynamic Watershed Development Programme, Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Jal Bhumi Sandharan Abhiyan have been implemented in the village. Records accessed by Gedewad, under the Right to Information Act, show Rs 3 crore was spent in just desilting of a cement naala bund and creating micro watersheds in the village. But villagers say they haven’t seen or been a part of any of this work.
Social activist Shivaji Gedewad has collated data under the RTI which points are discrepancies in the state’s claim. Photo: Sukanya Shantha/The Wire
“They claim the work was completed under the MGNREGA. No one from the village was employed under this. If you go where the work was supposed to have been done, you will know the real condition,” says Balbir Dantalwad. In 2013, Dantalwad had filed a case against the then-village sarpanch Ramrao Maskhale for forging the NREGA documents.
“Money was claimed under non-existent and dead persons’ names. The sarpanch had to spend a few days in prison. But the ground reality has not changed much. In fact, Maskhale is a star campaigner for the BJPs candidate in Mukhed constituency,” Dantalwad claims.
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Gedewad, under the RTI Act, has accessed papers to cross-check the implementation of several schemes, particularly the JSA in Marathwada area. He says, “In almost all places, the work is conducted in an unscientific manner. At places, streams have been dredged and deepened to the extent that aquifers are left bare. In some spots, the check dam built has only further aggravated the water crisis of the region.” In other places, absolutely no work has been done, he says.
Most work undertaken under the Jalyukt Siwar Abhiyan has been left incomplete or poorly done. Photo: Sukanya Shantha/The Wire
Earlier this year, Fadnavis claimed that under the scheme, as many as 2,54,000 soil and water conservation structures have been constructed in over 16,500 villages. He said the state has spent approximately Rs 7,690 crore.
According to the CM, the scheme created a water storage capacity of 24,000 million cubic feet and has succeeded in bringing as much as 3.4 million hectares under irrigation. He further claimed that in Marathwada alone, which has remained the primary focus area of the JSA, 70% of the work has been finished. This has created a storage potential of 818,000 TMC of water, he said.
In both Sawargaon Pir and Mangayal, a majority of villagers said they had voted for the BJP in the last election. “Most persons from our village had collectively decided to vote for (Tushar) Rathod in 2014. Access to water had been the primary reason for changing our preference from the Congress to the BJP. But in these five years, our condition has worsened. We won’t make this mistake again,” Lakshman Gawate, a 31-year-old gram panchayat member at Mangayal village claimed.
In 2014, Rathod won in the constituency against then-incumbent Congress MLA Hanmanthrao Venketrao Patil with a margin of more than 70,000 votes. The BJP has fielded him again. Rathod was unavailable for his comment, even after several attempts.
Opposition leaders in the region also support the locals’ claims. Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi’s Nanded South candidate Farooq Ahmed says most villages that he has travelled to have an identical problem. “For all the fanfare projected in the media and the CM’s speeches, this scheme has managed to achieve very little on ground,” Ahmed claims.
The Congress’s senior leader and former chief minister Ashok Cavan alleged that even with the complete failure of the rural schemes, the BJP has not spoken about during the campaign. “In almost every election speech, both the local and national leaders of the BJP have made rhetorical speeches and invoked Kashmir and nationalism. The water condition which has ravaged this region all along has only further worsened under this government,” claims Chavan, a Congress candidate from Nanded’s Bhokar constituency.
