Ishok village of Bishnupur district have good reasons to be proud of. When most parts of the states are facing water scarcity, the village has enough water for everyone in the locality. There are no miracles involved despite appearing so. What the villagers have done is maintaining the community pond that was dug thirty years ago on two acres of land. Each households of the village contribute a paltry sum of money as maintenance fee annually. During the monsoon every year, the pond is fed with water from the nearby rivers. The water is then treated with bleaching powder and lime. And it is enough to last for a year, even when there is no rainfall. The people of Ishok do not have to worry about water today, when most of us are facing acute shortage. What is exemplary about the village is, one: the collective understanding of harvesting water for community use, in spite of its advantageous location of having being situated near another water body, which is the river. Two: a disciplined unanimity in action of conserving a community asset. People residing in Imphal area should learn lessons from Ishok village. Most of the ponds in Imphal areas are now without water. Some ponds that have little water at its bed are untreatable. Construction of retaining wall around the ponds has contaminated the water. This is a simple fact needing no scientific verification. Community ponds have become a favourite advertisement ground for MLAs to show that they are doing something for the constituency. The retaining wall is their misplaced benevolence to cover up their sullen inactiveness. Not only the MLAs, but also the ‘social workers’ who wish to represent the people in the Assembly indulge in cements and bricks politics. Construction of retaining wall along the ponds is an important part of their electoral crusade. On the other hand, there is a deepening lack of collectivism among the inhabitants of Imphal. They are happy to build houses with underground water storage and buy water from the private tankers to fill with it. They buy water pump sets to draw water from the pipelines, as much as they can. Neighbours compete to buy pump sets with maximum horsepower. When a particular pipeline gets dry, a whole family would come out to drill another pipeline that runs in their vicinity. Not to mention of the roads that got dug out, and are left best to the nightmare of the public. This is also true that most of the pipelines that got drilled are carried out with expert hands, who are mostly employees of the government department. You grease their palms to get water flowing into the house. Meanwhile the ponds in the community are left to the hands of MLAs and ‘social workers’. Now that the problem of water scarcity is hitting hard, leaving those with pump sets and multi pipeline connections for the rain God to smile. People are now turning their attention to the abandoned community ponds which are lying in a precarious condition. It can’t get any worse when the minister of IFCD blames global warming for the scarcity. Should we consider ourselves fortunate to have a minister equipped with a popular vocabulary? For better or worse, how does he explain the failure of his department to provide the rainfall data and the water level of two important rivers for the last three months? You blame it on global warming. IFP shall carry more stories of villages with reserved community ponds to draw lessons from them.
Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/04/lessons-from-ishok/