Srinagar: Since the last three months Shanipora village in Khansahib, Budgam has been witnessing shortage of drinking water, pushing people to walk long distances to fetch drining water from nearby streams amidst the pandemic.
According to locals, the recently renamed Jal Shakti Department has not been considering their requests and complaints and are instead ‘mistreating’ them.
The authorites however, deny that such conditions exist, and pin the blame on ‘one local resident’.
Speaking to Free Press Kashmir, Assistant Executive Engineer, PHE (now called Jal Shakti), Gurmeet Singh said, “one local resident has been misinforming the press on water shortage. There is absolutely no water shortage in Budgam.”
Other villages too have been reporting the same crisis. In Tral’s Hari Parigam village, locals say they are facing drinking water shortages, and that they have been fetching water, for all purposes, from nearby villages.
In Sopore’s Warpora area too, residents staged protests on July 14 blaming the Jal Shakti Department for not providing regular water supply to the residents.
The residents say they have been fetching water from dirty streams and rivers, making children and elderly vulnerable to diseases.
Currently, water shortage is the chief concern of people not just in these villages but also in Srinagar and Kupwara, places that had not seen water problems before.
Jal Shakti officials blame the residents for ‘overuse of water in their kitchen gardens’, hence the supply is not meeting the demand.
Speaking to Free Press Kashmir, Abdul Samad, an engineer with Jal Shakti dept in Kupwara said that the supply of water from the source is as usual and has not been affected.
There has been no official statement by Jal Shakti Department regarding these constant complaints of water shortage.
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