No water, no more daily baths in this Gadag village

Hubballi: No one even thinks of bathing  every day in the  hamlet of Suganahalli in Shirahatti taluk of Gadag district. Despite the scorching heat, people here bathe only twice a week and even then reuse the  water used for their bath for washing their clothes. So acute is the water shortage here that the villagers queue up the entire night to fetch water from  the only functional borewell in the village.

They are not alone in their suffering as several other villages too like  Bannikoppa, Bagewadi, Murudi and Chikkavaddatti are coping with a severe water shortage with the local lakes having dried up in the absence of rainfall over the last two years.

With the ground water table in the region falling to 400 feet and contaminated with  fluoride, the farmers take their cattle to the nearby Kappattagudda forest in search of water for them. "The  polluted water supplied from the Tungabhadra river to our village is unhygienic and is affecting the health of the people,  especially the children. We go to farms in other villages to take a bath using their borewell water. Otherwise, we stay without a bath for several days," said Suganahalli villager, Venkatesh Adarakatti.

Gadag Zilla Panchayat project director, T Dinesh, however, claims that the administration is supplying drinking water through  tankers to 11 villages in the district and doing its best to overcome the shortage. "The nodal officers in every gram panchayat and taluk panchayat are supervising the situation. We are  ready to supply water to these  villages too if they ask for it," he assured, when contacted.