The Hindu : Karaikal ryots desperate for water

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Feb 18, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Tamil Nadu

Karaikal ryots desperate for water

By S.Vydhianathan

CHENNAI Feb. 17. If at all 10-15 per cent of standing samba crop is saved in delta districts, it is partly due to perseverance on the part of farmers.

They never allowed the crop to wither for want of water and did all they could to save the `dying crop'. Not a single drop of available water was allowed to go waste, especially in places where fields are close to canals.

As the Mettur reservoir was closed a fortnight ago (it is since has been opened for three-day supply), there was no natural flow, except pools of water along the canals. The farmers, in their anxiety, to provide the last wettings to the water-starved crop were pumping stagnated water with diesel pumpsets. One could see diesel pumps all along the GA Canal in the Pattukottai region pumping out water from the canal. In some points, farmers laid PVC pipes for more than a km from the pumping point to the field.

Though the exercise cost them heavily, the farmers went ahead. In fact, there is a shortage of PVC pipes and joints in the delta districts following a heavy demand from farmers. Most of those, who resorted to this exercise, were either small or marginal farmers owning less than five acres.

Fortyyear-old Shanmugasundaram in Nattarasankottai in the Pattukottai region, who raised the crop on his three acres, has, so far, spent about Rs 9,000. Pumping water from the canal cost him Rs. 1,000 more, which he had raised, pledging his valuables. He said he knew that the returns would be much less as the productivity would be low. Yet he was not ready to give up. In some places, tankers were being used to transport water to fields from nearby wells.

However, in some villages, the farmers complained that they were not allowed to utilise water available in fishponds, which get supply from nearby canals and the surplus from the ponds flows to fields in the vicinity.

But contractors of fishponds did not allow farmers to bail out water to their fields. At Pudukulam in the Pattukottai region, there is sufficient water in one pond. But as the local panchayat union had given the fishing right to a contractor, farmers were not allowed to use the pond.

Had they been allowed to use such ponds, crop on more areas could have been saved, lamented the farmers.

At Neravi in the Karaikal region, thanks to a regulator across Tirumalairayan river, farmers saved the crop on a few hundred acres.

As there was a water spread over one-km length, farmers on either side of the river, belonging to Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry, were utilising it.

Interestingly the construction of the regulator was initially opposed by Tamil Nadu, but Karaikal farmers succeeded in building it after a 10-year battle with the Union Territory administration.

Loan-cum-subsidy sought

Meanwhile, the chief of the Tamil Nadu Federation of Women Presidents of Panchayat Government, Ponni Kailasam, suggested that the State Government think of a loan-cum-subsidy scheme to provide PVC pipes, furnace oil and diesel pumpsets to small farmers.

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