Easy access to drinking water was a dream for the residents of Sundra village in Rajasthan's Barmer district till last week, when water gushed out of a tap built in the middle of a desert, after overcoming numerous obstacles, to ensure supply from a river hundreds of kilometres away.
Even though the tap, set up under the Centre's Jal Jeevan Mission, supplies water to every household for only a couple of hours once a week, villagers claim the facility has put an end to their hardships and alleviated their woes to a large extent.
"We get tap water once a week for two to three hours. We used to use saline water earlier. The only way to get sweet potable water was to store rainwater," Jetharam, a villager, said.
The people of the village, located 50 kms from the India-Pakistan border, were initially dependent on "beris" or deep wells for water. These wells were, however, destroyed during the 1965 India-Pakistan war, when the area was captured by the Pakistani forces.
The villagers then either turned to tubewells, which provided saline water, or undertook arduous journeys daily to fetch sweet water from deep wells situated 10kms away.
"It was very difficult for us to walk for 10kms to fetch drinking water. Barmer is 150kms away and this is the last village on the border with Pakistan," Girdhar Singh, another villager, said.
The village is located 50 kms from the India-Pakistan border.
Officials said the tap connection was built after overcoming several obstacles, to bring water from the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River in Gujarat. The vast expanse of desert and the shifting sand dunes make it difficult to lay pipelines in the area, the officials added.
Setting a budget of over Rs 500 crores, the Centre has earmarked 250 villages in Jaisalmer and Barmer, along the border with Pakistan, for water supply from the Narmada canal. Under the Jal Jeevan Mission, the government seeks to provide piped water to every household in the country.
"It took us one year to lay the pipelines as the shifting sand dunes in this desert region cause a lot of problems. The work has been undertaken under the Jal Jeevan Mission and 70% of the target has been met. By March 2025, we aim to complete the work...," Sonaram Beniwal, senior engineer at the Barmer public health engineering department, said.
"It is a great achievement under the Jal Jeevan Mission. The quality of water in this desert area is very poor. It has high fluoride content and is very salty. The water from the Narmada canal is sweet. The setting up of the water has resolved the drinking water problem in this area to a large extent," he added.
"They have connected all the homes. You can see it for yourself," another villager Hakam Singh told this reporter.
(With inputs from Raju Mali in Sundra village)
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