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Karnataka
An island of deprivation
Successive administrations have done very little for the residents of Bengre
UNWELCOME EXCERCISE: Manish Kumar (right) hauls a pot of water from the neighbourhood well with the help of his friend. It is the only source of water in this area.
MANGALORE: There are two important cogs in the life of 10-year-old Manish Kumar — the neighbourhood well and the village bus. Manish has to get to the well every morning, before anybody else gets there and give himself as well as his five-year-old sister a bath.
If he fails to get to the well in time, he fails to catch the 6.45 a.m. bus. Failure to catch the bus in time means that his sister and he do not get to go to school which starts at 10 a.m. The next bus is at noon.
Every morning, there is intense competition for the water in the well in this neighbourhood near the Fatima Church in Bengre.
“I don’t mind getting up even earlier… it is my little sister who screams and shouts when we try to wake her up,” he says.
Manish’s daily ordeal does not end with the bus.
“I take an hour to reach the school. My sister and I have to simply sit and wait for two hours for the school to start,” he says. His parents cannot afford the more expensive ferry to the mainland.
When asked how his situation could be improved, the little boy says: “I wish I had a tap in my house that would gush water the moment I turn it on,” and adds with a sly grin, “I do not mind missing school though.”
Just like little Manish, for the thousands of residents of this six-kilometre piece of land, which lies between the Arabian Sea and Gurupur River, life is a constant battle for potable drinking water and reliable public transport. This despite the fact that it is very much in the Mangalore City Corporation (Ward number 60) limits.
Although there are some water pipelines here, Janardhan Suvarna (50), Manish’s neighbour, says, “The taps are dry for months at-a-time. When there is water it comes in a trickle and without announcement.”
When asked about the transport, Kursamma (48), a homemaker, says that after 7 p.m. the entire area is cut off from the rest of the world.
There are no buses and no ferries. “The private bus operators will obviously not come here because it is not profitable. We need Government-run buses,” she says.
Harish Putran (22), a fisherman, says that the rains unleash the greatest misery on the people of this area. “The wells get polluted, the buses stop coming altogether and the waterways become dangerous to navigate. We get marooned,” he says. According to him, medical emergencies going awry is commonplace.
The nearest hospital is either two km across the (sometime turbulent) river or 20 km by road.
Successive administrations have done very little, say people here. Ismail Bengre expresses little hope as he says, “We are just residents of a picturesque piece of land that protects Mangalore city from the sea.”
Before delimitation, this strip of land fell under the erstwhile Ullal and Surathkal constituencies, now it is part of the newly formed Mangalore South Constituency.
The two frontrunners in this constituency, N. Yogish Bhat (Bharatiya Janata Party) and Ivan D’Souza (Congress) have expressed their inclination to remedy the situation.
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