The incident of a six -year -old girl, Kaveri Ajit Madar, falling into a deep open borewell in Belagavi is disturbing. The accident could have been averted had the owner of the borewell taken care to close it.
But in many cases owners of failed borewells remove the casing pipes and sell them to make up for the loss they have incurred. Should anyone fall into them later and die, the owners, who abandoned the borewells without capping them, should be held responsible and a criminal case lodged against them. They must be jailed to deter others from being as careless.
Also, the Department of Mines and Geology needs to be more vigilant and keep track of borewells that are no longer in use. It must ensure that their owners close them without delay.
I have not heard of any such deaths reported from borewells in Bengaluru as the dry ones are usually capped. But there is over-exploitation of groundwater in the city. The spike in the number of borewells in Bengaluru is mainly due to its exploding population. The water board has received 16,571 applications to sink borewells since 2013 and this number will keep increasing as the population is growing and there is still no piped water supply to the peripheral areas of the city. The water table in these parts has become a matter of concern as the people are sinking more borewells than they should in the absence of BWSSB water. The only solution is to provide more piped water connections and recharge the existing borewells in the city.
