Digging deep in Aurangabad as drought drags

When one thinks of Aurangabad region in Maharashtra, images of Buddhist rock-cut cave temples and monasteries of Ajanta and Ellora, with their extraordinary wall paintings, come to the mind.

But these days, the villagers living in the vicinity of the UNESCO heritage sites are a worried lot. Consecutive droughts have hit the region very hard with an acute scarcity of potable water.

Local dams and reservoirs have almost dried up with water levels reaching three per cent of the installed capacity. At Mahtrewadi village, which is just over an hour’s drive from Ellora caves the villagers are devastated by the failure of kharif and rabi crops. The village has over 50 per cent marginal farmers with less than one hectare of land holding. Their suffering is the worst. The village of 1,205 people is totally dependent on water tankers as the only water left in the ground is fit for animal consumption. People have drilled bore wells up to 450 feet but water is still elusive.

Local farmer Bhagwan Mahatre said that kharif crops such as cotton, maize and soyabean were affected and rabi crops were a complete wash out with only five per cent crops such as jowar and wheat standing in the fields. “Earlier, we had 50 acres under wheat but today not even a single acre is cultivated due to water shortage. We even had sugarcane fields and mosambi (sweet lime) orchards but with ground water levels receding over the years we were forced to abandon such crops,” Mahatre said.

In the neighbouring Jalna district, people are more desperate — they are digging new wells, as the summer gets harsher. Local farmers Chandrakant Ghare has already dug a 50-feet deep well, which is about 25-feet wide. He has already spent ₹5 lakh for the well but is yet to hit water. In Parbhani city, the State Administration has imposed Section 144 in areas, where water from tankers is distributed to the people. This is to avoid fights over water. The city gets water every 15 days. People store water in large drums and tanks. Markets are dotted with shops selling such tanks costing from a few hundreds to thousand rupees.

At a local hardware store, owner Ashok Parikh, said that all kinds of pumps and water storage tanks are being sold. “Since water is being supplied only once every 15 days, people are investing in pumps with higher capacity for drawing water from borewells, where the water level has dipped drastically,” he said.

Retired school teacher Smita Patki says that in spite of her advanced age she has come to the water filling points for her quota of water. With great difficulty, she manages to fill her drum of water and drag it to her house. “Sometimes the water tanker comes at night. I feel scared to step out of the house but I do not have an alternative as I stay alone,” she said.

In the rural Hingoli district, where mosambi used to be cultivated extensively, there has been a decline in the cultivatable area over the years due to water scarcity.

Orchard owner Bhaskar Ghav says that the water situation has been declining since 1998. Mosambi orchard owners were prosperous till 2006, today the orchards have completely wilted. In the last 4 years, the orchard yield has dipped by 80 per cent. In some villages, orchards have reduced from 125 acres to 25 acres.

Under farm pond scheme for horticulture, some villages have attempted to tap the rainfall. They have a huge farm pond, which can hold about one crore litres of water but due to lack of rainfall and destruction of the plastic lining of the pond, rainwater has all but evaporated. A farm pond needs good plastic lining to hold water and many villages cannot afford the ₹2 lakh for changing the lining. Ghav says that cash crops such as turmeric which used to give an yield of 30 quintals per acre are now giving only 50 kg, such is the devastating impact of the drought. Chaggan Jamdhande, Sarpanch of Raiwadi village in Basmath taluka of Hingoli, says that the drought is a double whammy for the farmers.

Every raw material costs have increased, labour cost has gone up but today he has nothing on his farm, Earlier, farmers could buy a sack of DAP fertiliser for ₹400 but today it is ₹1,200. But onion is sold at ₹5 per kg. One-acre cultivation cost of soyabean was about ₹10,000, but today the farmers get a meagre ₹3,000 as selling price,” he said.

Aurangabad’s Divisional Commissioner, Umakant Dangat, said: “For the first time, we are facing a combined meteorological, hydro-logical and agriculture drought. Climate change and erratic rainfall have resulted in a reduction in crop yield by 70 per cent. Cotton, soyabean and fodder crops are majorly affected. It has led to low productivity of crops.”

Dangat says there is not solution for the region’s water problems. People will simply have to put up with less water until rains arrive.

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