50,000 women from Gujarat write postcards to PM Modi on water shortage

The Karmavad lake and Mukteshwar dam controversy in North Gujarat took an unusual turn on Sunday after 50,000 women sent letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi requesting to bring the water bodies under the Narmada Command region. Since the water levels in the Mukteshwar dam and Karmavad lake dropped and are now both drying out, residents of the Vadgam constituency have been protesting for a few months. According to public demand, both these sources of water should be topped over with Narmada water.

With local politicians fighting among themselves, the water deficit has turned into a significant political problem. The Vadgam Assembly district, where Jignesh Mevani is the current MLA, includes both reservoirs. He recently used the catchphrase ‘No water, No vote’ to criticise the incumbent government, claiming that they were denying the region access to Narmada water.

As per BJP state unit president C.R. Patil, Mevani was bringing up the water problem because he knows he would lose the polls in December. Patil questioned if Mevani had been sleeping for four and a half years, as well as why he had not brought up the subject sooner.

‘This issue is not of the last two to three months, people of this area have been crying foul for the last 30 years. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi is well aware of the water shortage in the Vadgam area, as the issue was raised before him when he was the chief minister’, said Ramesh Patel, leader of Karmavad & Mukteshwar Jal Andolan Samiti. He said that 50,000 women from 125 villages had sent the Prime Minister postcards to remind him of his commitment.

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Patel, who is also a farmer, claimed that although the majority of these villages depend on the monsoon, pastoralists still provide the district cooperative Rs 2,000 crore of milk each year. He said that the revenue may reach Rs 10,000 crore if the two reservoirs were filled with Narmada water.

The cost of raising water from the Narmada canal is being calculated by the government. Patel’s cautious estimate is that even if Rs 500 crore were to be spent on water lifting to fill these reservoirs, the state could make it up within a year due to rising subterranean water levels, thriving agriculture, rising demand for tractors and increased tax revenue.