Mayhem at barrage, water crisis

(men at work at the damaged lock gate)

 (the gate cordoned off to dry)

Many hundred thousand residents of Durgapur – including myself – went through a harrowing week after water supply from the Damodar Barrage was suddenly cut off on Saturday the 31^st October, following the collapse of one of the lockgates.

Mercifully we are only two people in our household at the moment, and I immediately filled up my little reservoir (unlike most of my neighbours, my father never built a magnum tank underground), the overhead tanks and the oversized bathtub before the taps ran dry. Then the endurance test began.

Repair and restoration work, involving the Irrigation Department of the government of West Bengal (which runs the barrage), DSP engineers and the municipality started apparently on a war footing immediately: but, of course, ‘war footing’ means something very different in India from what it signifies, say, in Germany. In any case, they had to wait four days for the river bed to run dry, cordoning off the affected gate with massive piles of sandbags (very low tech, I think… aren’t there faster, more efficient ways in this day and age?). Then the repair work itself took nearly two days, then they started releasing water from upstream (Maithan dam), and the water level in the feeder canals had to rise to a certain height before the pumping stations could start working again. The water supply was restored at about 9 p.m. on Friday the 6^th. I filled up the tanks again, running the pump at midnight, and since then I have kept my fingers crossed, lest something untoward happens (someone has already told me that the hurried repair has been in the nature of patchwork, and the damaged gate is leaking) and the supply is cut off again.

Why does this sort of thing have to happen? The barrage was built in 1955, and the tremendous pressure of water that it has to withstand (including especially abnormal times, such as the great flood of 1978), combined with the extremely corrosive properties of our river water, makes it a given that the gates suffer slow but cumulative damage over the decades: you don’t have to be either an engineer or a professional administrator to know that, and give warnings and take timely preventive action. A very similar mishap actually occurred three years ago; it was quickly mended, but that should have set the alarm bells ringing. It seems from newspaper reports that a decision was taken to repair eleven of the gates which were visibly in poor shape, but till date only four have been taken care of. Now, after this second scare they have decided to replace all the gates one by one, but, given the speed at which our authorities work once  a crisis is past and forgotten, heaven knows whether that, or the next disaster, will happen first… and I wonder why, in an increasingly more populated town which aspires to be tagged ‘smart city’ soon, we should go on depending on a single source of water. The luckiest people in town were those who had their own wells and tube wells, but, since people like me happen to live in one of the ‘smartest’ (read ‘planned’-) parts, we are not even allowed to dig wells of our own, because that will severely lower the water table soon. Granted that is a valid argument, but then, why are we still depending, this entire Bidhan Nagar area, on one small supply tank built half a century ago, which runs out of water within a single day, when the population of the area has increased at least fifty fold over the same time period? [P.S., Nov. 09: I am delighted to read in today's newspaper that in this one instance, at least, the municipal authorities are doing some serious forward thinking. Better late than never, certainly.]

Another thing I learnt is that Bengalis – they have always been know-alls, however uneducated and socially insignificant they might actually be – have become absolutely confident about talking absolute nonsense. I heard so many authorities on TV and in newspapers, I met so many on the street, and they all told me with total certitude that the water supply was going to be restored on such a date and at such a time, and most of them got it dead wrong (indeed, according to someone in uniform at the local police outpost, we are not going to get any water at all till Monday, the day after tomorrow)!

One last thing. I saw my neighbours – the same people who have far bigger reservoirs at home than I do! – queuing up before mobile water tankers morning and evening from the third day onwards, and buying large plastic bottles of drinking water every day on top of that. My mother and I had simply decided to avoid all usage of water except the bare essentials, drinking, cooking and washroom use, and our stored supply sufficed to tide us over. How much water people must be habitually wasting, really! I wish the government would finally get it into its thick head that instead of charging flat water taxes, which encourages waste, water supply should be metered, as electric supply is metered and charged for – which is what the World Bank very sensibly advised decades ago. But no, we shall wait for real, nationwide disaster to strike before we take wise, farsighted decisions of any sort. We are Indians after all.

[By the way, whenever I provide a link to some old blogpost, so many people visit it that it quickly gets into the Most Read list. It has happened with my review of the movie The Bucket List this time. Why on earth don’t visitors explore older posts on their own?]