Under a dry spell 

65-year-old Chilaka Bhukya Bhai's daily struggle for water in drought-hit Andhra Pradesh village highlights severe water scarcity.

Covering her face with the ends of her blue saree, 65-year-old Chilaka Bhukya Bhai steps out of her home on a sweltering Monday morning, a walking stick in one hand and a large steel pot in another. Ambling through the narrow lanes of Remidicherla village in Palnadu district of Andhra Pradesh, she makes her way to a tractor-tanker stationed about 200 metres away. She fills the pot with around 20 litres of water, places it on her head and walks back home, struggling with each step. Her daily journey is imbued with purpose; it is a ritual of survival, she says. 

“This is our fate. What else can we do when there is a scarcity of water and proper facilities are not in place? I can’t walk properly due to knee problems, but I have to fetch water for myself,” she rues, about the physical and symbolic burden that she carries every day. 

Six tractor-driven water tankers supply water to the village daily. Among them, one belongs to the State government’s Rural Water Supply & Sanitation (RWS&S) Department, while the rest are provided by the Telugu Desam Party and the YSR Congress Party. Tractor drivers transport water five to six times daily from nearby agricultural fields, covering a distance of 2-3 kilometres per trip. 

“Since it is election time, political leaders are showing keen interest in supplying water through tractor tankers at their own expense. Once the elections are over, we can’t expect such support from them,” says a resident of Remidicherla village, requesting anonymity. If the tankers stop supply, people will be forced to fetch water from other sources on their own, the villager adds. 

Remidicherla, with a population of about 5,500, of which around 4,000 are eligible voters, faces a pressing need for water to sustain its 2,500 cattle, along with 10,000 goats and sheep. A former sarpanch of the village, Bareddy Venkateswara Reddy, 57, who earned national recognition for promoting the theme of ‘Water sufficiency and clean gram panchayat’, says the community has invested ₹3 crore in various water management initiatives, including the construction of temporary or small check dams, water percolation tanks, and the repair of summer storage (SS) tanks. All these initiatives, he says, contributed to a notable rise in groundwater levels. Despite these efforts, however, the village finds itself grappling with water scarcity, exacerbated by a prolonged dry spell and insufficient rainfall spanning over the past six months. 

Venkateswara Reddy says there are approximately 300 borewells in residential areas, and nearly 1,000 in agricultural lands, all reaching depths of around 1,000 feet. The cost of drilling each borewell comes to at least ₹100 per foot. 

Bareddy Mallepu Reddy, another village elder, stresses the importance of completing the Varikapudisela Lift Minor Irrigation project as a crucial step in tackling the water scarcity issue in Bollapalli mandal, which includes Remidicherla. He points out that none of the 10 SS tanks or water storage ponds in the village currently holds any water.